Since Motorola came out with MotoRAZR Maxx V6 Ferrari Limited Edition, a Ferrari phone is not a new thing to see. But the Maxx V6 only looks like a phone, and not like a car. Assuming that the world might need a phone that actually resembles a Ferrari, an anonymous producer came up with such a handset. And I'm not sure if I should welcome this news with joy or just with a tendentious smile.
The handset we talk about is called simply "F1" and it was spotted on Special Phones - a retailer that sells devices produced in China, South Korea, Japan, China, China and China (the more-than-one mentioning of China is deliberate, of course, because most of the phones sold via this retailer come from there).
The F1 looks like a Ferrari toy-car, but it actually hides, under its red body, a functional mobile phone which is unveiled if you turn the "car" upside down. In terms of features, the F1 offers dual-band GSM connectivity, a 2.2 inches display (touchscreen apparently) with an 176 x 220 pixels resolution and 260k colors, MP3 player, Video player (3GP and MP4), WAP browser and embedded games. The phone weighs 82 grams, measures 120 x 42 x 25 mm (ouch, that's thick - 1 inch) and also has a 1.3 Megapixel camera, integrated into the car's windshield. Pure genius.
The F1 can be bought from Special Phones for $190 (120 Euros) plus shipping fees, without any contract and also without any guarantee that it will work properly.
Anyway, I wonder what the real Ferrari has to say about this. Not about the "working properly" part, but about the whole thing. I assume you know Ferrari branded a lot of non-related-to-cars products, including perfumes, eyewear or pencils, but this F1 phone is surely not created following an agreement with the Italian company.