Motorola has officially announced today the release of a new handset from its popular PEBL series, which debuted back in 2005 with the PEBL U6 model.

The new PEBL was announced in South Korea, and it doesn't seem to come under any other name than simply "Motorola PEBL". Or, at least that's what I can tell from the press release posted on the Motorola Korea website. Anyway, regardless of its name, the new PEBL is surely a good-looking handset. Designed by Moto's Consumer Experience Design team from Seoul, the phone is actually too good looking, coming in a fancy purple color - hence it will probably be popular mainly among female mobile users.

Like the previous PEBL handsets, the Korean one is a clamshell that features rounded edges and a hidden external display - whose function goes beyond that of being eyecandy material, as it also has the role of a touch-enabled music controller.

The new Moto resembles the PEBL U9, which was released in Europe a few months ago, but it's a bit bigger and brings more advanced features. These include: a 2.2-inch TFT internal display with 262K colors and 240 x 320 pixels, GSM and HSDPA connectivity (the latter allowing data transfers speeds of up to 7.2 Mbps), Music player, a 3.5mm headset jack, Bluetooth 2.0, a 2 Megapixel camera with video recording, secondary camera for video-calls and expandable memory.

Moto PEBL for Korea weighs 103 grams and, when not flipped, measures 100 x 48.9 x 18.5 millimeters. Its battery is a 950 mAh one, capable of providing up to 200 minutes of talk-time, up to 240 hours of GSM stand-by time, and up to 130 hours of 3G stand-by time.

Motorola says that the new PEBL is available across South Korea, via SK Telecom, but it doesn't give any pricing details as well. Also, the company did not say if and when the new purple clamshell is to be released in other countries.