ModeLabs, a French designer of custom-made mobile phones, together with Hummer, General Motor's off-road vehicles division, announced the release of the second Hummer branded mobile phone, HT2 Hummer.

Coming after HT1 Hummer, a handset launched last year and sold in more than 50,000 units worldwide, the new phone is designed, as the first model, to bring in mind the look of the powerful Hummer vehicles.

Unlike the first Hummer phone, which was (is, actually) a slider, the new Hummer HT2 comes in a candybar form factor. HT2 is slimmer than HT1 and it also weighs less: it has 103 × 51 × 12 millimeters (4.05 x 2.0 x 0.47 inches) and 95 grams (3.35 ounces).

HT2 Hummer's features do not make it a high-end phone, as you would expect from a device bearing the Hummer name, but rather a mid to entry-level one. The handset comes with an 176 x 220 pixels TFT display (262k colors support), a 2 Megapixel camera with video recording, GSM900 / DCS1800 / PCS1900 connectivity (hence no 3G), Music palyer (MP3, WAV, AAC, MID and AMR), Video player (MP4, 3GP and 3GPP), email, WAP 2.0 browser, Bluetooth 1.2, Java MIDP 2.0, embedded games, USB and microSD card support (a 256MB memory card is included in the package).

ModeLabs says the new Hummer phone has a battery capable of providing up to 500 hours of stand-by time, but on Fly Mobile's website (one of the phone's distributors) the device is credited with only 340 hours of stand-by time and up to 8 hours of talk-time. Probably the truth is somewhere not in the middle, but under the times reported by Fly Mobile, as most of the cell phones have poorer battery life-times than presented by their producers.

HT2 Hummer (or Hummer HT2, call it whatever you want) will be first available via Fly Mobile, in Russia, and after that in Latin America. The phone's price is not known yet, nor is its availability for other markets except the mentioned ones.