Philips, the Dutch electronics manufacturer, rolls out a new touchscreen mobile phone that brings no special features but looks nice and will certainly appeal to users who don't want or don't afford expensive handsets.

Philips 692 is the name of the new phone and it is a mid-end, dual-band GSM device that works on the 900 and 1800 MHz frequencies. It packs a 2.4 inches TFT 256K colors touchscreen with a resolution of 240 x 320 pixels, capable of handwriting recognition, in both English and Chinese. This being said, it's clear that Philips intends to make 692 a successful handset for the huge Chinese mobile market, and we believe it has all the chances, since it's an affordable and good looking handset, the perfect combination for mid-end users.

The new Philips is dressed in black and comes in a pretty nice slider form, weighing 102 grams and, when closed, measuring 104 x 48 x 14.9 millimeters - not bad at all. The handset packs a 1.3 Megapixel CMOS camera, failing to provide high quality photos, but enough to capture fun moments when you don't have a good camera around. The 11 MB on-board memory that the phone comes with can prove to be insufficient, hence the device has microSD card support for another extra 2 GB.

The handset also features MP3 and MPEG4 player, to satisfy the needs of media-orientated users, and polyphonic ring tones. Of course, we also have other useful features, like GPRS class 10, EMS, MMS, Embedded games, English-Chinese and Chinese-English dictionaries, calculator, calendar, alarm clock, stopwatch, international unit converter, weight control application, women's calendar and so on.

There are not details about how much the new Philips slider costs, but its price will be known quite soon, as it should be commercially available until the end of January 2008.