The South Korean mobile phone manufacturing company Pantech has announced that they will supply branded mobile handsets to the French carrier Orange France, the first of the series being the Pantech U-4000, a 3G cell phone with a design somewhat similar to the famous iPod MP3 player and some influences from SanDisk's e260 multimedia player. By mixing the two design approaches, Pantech has arrived to a very black and also very good-looking cell phone that will make its owner proud of his choice.

This tri-band UMTS handset will offer you a generous 1.9 inch 260k colors TFT display with a 176x220 pixels resolution, a 1.3 megapixel digital camera plus a VGA one for video calls, 512 MB of internal memory, of which only 30 MB are at the user's disposal, memory expandable through the microSD memory card slot, a multimedia player with support for audio and video file types, integrated WAP 2.0, JAVA MIDP 2.0 and DRM 1.0 technologies, and wireless Bluetooth connectivity, all crammed in a 95x43x16.5 mm body that weighs 90 grams.

Dennis Cheong, President of Pantech Europe, has declared after the signing of the deal between the two companies that "this major partnership with Orange is an outstanding testament to the quality of Pantech's advanced mobile handset technologies. More significantly, the agreement demonstrates our ongoing commitment to meet and exceed the expectations of our customers in Europe."

The price and release date of the Pantech U-4000 aren't yet disclosed to the public, but - as soon as we'll get our hands on anything new - you will be the first to know.