Philips recently unveiled one of its latest mobile phones from the Xenium family, Philips 9@9j, a handset that comes to bring a standard Li-Ion battery plus an extra slot where AAA batteries can be introduced. The handset is made in collaboration with Techtium and Energizer, two companies that also worked with Philips in 2007 to bring the first ever mobile phone with support for AAA batteries: Philips Xenium NRG.

The new Philips 9@9j is a quad-band GSM device that works on the 850, 900, 1800 and 1900 MHz frequencies and provides GPRS and Bluetooth connectivity. Measuring 110 x 45 x 15 millimeters and weighing 98 grams, the phone comes in a candybar form and it looks stylish enough to attract everyone's attention. Among its features we have a TFT display with a 176 x 220 pixel resolution, video and music players, FM Radio, 1.3 Megapixels camera, 1 GB of internal memory and microSD card support.

Philips 9@9j's Li-Ion battery can provide a talk-time of 8 hours and a stand-by time of up to 720 hours, which means about a whole month. Moreover, when the standard battery is out of power, the AAA battery comes in (supposing that there is one in the special dedicated slot) to give the phone a plus of about 2 hours of talk-time and a stand-by time of up to one week. Pretty nice, isn't it?

Philips Xenium mobile phones are renowned for their capacity to provide an extended battery life-time. Unfortunately, most of them are not commercialized world-wide, but only in the Asia region. Anyway, it looks like Philips handsets will make a come-back in Europe, starting with the release of Philips 192, an entry-level, affordable device.

Back to Philips 9@9j, the "AAA phone" should be available starting April 2008 for an unknown (yet) price, and hopefully users form Europe and North America will be able to get it too.