Hasta La Gadget!

Nokia has just unveiled a strange new beast of a smartphone. Internally, it’s your good old C7 — 3.5-inch AMOLED screen, 720p video recording, 8 megapixel camera, a pentaband radio, and Symbian as your zombie OS — but externally it’s taken on a lick of gold paint and a rear cover made of real leather. The price for a phone built quite so luxuriously is said to be upwards of €800 ($1,126) before taxes and subsidies and launch is expected in Q3 in select countries across Europe and Asia. Russia in particular is called out as a successful market for such “premium” phones, with Nokia’s Gabriel Speratti, General Manager for its operations in the country, explaining that:

“We have a large number of users who are looking for products with a build quality and superior materials that attest to their success and social standing. In some areas, possession of such premium products is the passport to being taken seriously.”

We have to agree, owning a phone like this will certainly have an effect on your social life, we’re just not so sure it’ll be a positive one.

Continue reading Nokia Oro is covered with 18ct gold on the outside, tinged with Symbian regret inside

Nokia Oro is covered with 18ct gold on the outside, tinged with Symbian regret inside originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 25 May 2011 05:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Discontinued products typically dip in value, but such is not the case with Leica lenses — unless they’re sawed in half. Leica students had an opportunity to “make” cutaways of two Leica lenses as part of a graduation project. A discontinued Tri-Elmar-M 28-35-50mm (valued at about $4,500 when fully functional) and a 50mm f/1.4 Summilux (about $3,700) were split, exposing various layers of glass and metal. Now forever unable to capture images of their own, all four halves were photographed, and the tri-focal lens was sold for $995 on eBay, complete with original box — which, unlike its contents, appears to be in like-new condition. We were probably at home playing Frogger when Kermit went under the knife in biology, but we would have definitely had a perfect attendance record in any class that involved brushing camera equipment across a circular saw.

$4,000 Leica lens split in two, sold on eBay as $1,000 piece of art originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 16 May 2011 16:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Behold Final Audio Design’s latest high-end earphones: the Piano Forte X-VII Series. Each of the four models that comprise the series features a large neodymium magnet driver, nestled inside a rigid metal housing made of alloy powder and natural resin, designed to minimize bad vibrations. The driver is a hefty 16 mm in diameter, and boasts roughly three times the surface area of your garden variety earphones, resulting in enhanced low frequency soundscapes. Final Audio Design also added a proprietary pressure ring to each model’s diaphragm (to ward off sound artifacts), as well as special pressure vents (to optimize air pressure around the diaphragm). Internal air pressure, on the other hand, is kept in check thanks to the X-VIII Series’ metallic earpads, which allegedly allow your ear to naturally adjust to any barometric shifts. Each of the four models comes in a unique metallic housing, reportedly capable of delivering different audio blends. But they all share one important characteristic — they’re really expensive. At the high end of the price spectrum are the X-G and X-CC models, which will put you back some ¥220,000 ($2,668). Bargain hunters, meanwhile, will have to settle for the VIII, priced at a slightly less obscene ¥80,000 ($970). Granted, these earphones may very well warrant that kind of cash and scientific hyperbole, though it’s certainly difficult to gauge their value without taking them out for a spin ourselves.

Final Audio Design’s Piano Forte earphones promise concert hall sound at bank-breaking prices originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 20 Apr 2011 14:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You wouldn’t think something classifiable as “wearable storage” would look so darn dapper, but here we are, staring at just about the finest cufflinks we ever did see. Not only are these handmade shirt cuffs beautiful in the most steampunk of ways, they’re also pretty useful as each features an 8GB flash storage chip with the utterly ubiquitous USB connector attached. Basically, they’re what James Bond would wear if James Bond wore really awesome cufflinks. The general idea behind them might not exactly be original anymore, but we can’t really fault the execution here. What we could probably find fault with is our lack of $225 of disposable coin, the price one will have to pay to sport this unique pair of hand-carved, walnut-enclosed memory sticks.

[Thanks, Amelia]

Continue reading Steampunk USB cufflinks are as awesome as they are pricey

Steampunk USB cufflinks are as awesome as they are pricey originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 Mar 2011 10:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s been a long road for the Karma to reach production, but now it finally has an end in sight: March 21st. That’s the date Fisker promises to start rolling its gorgeous PHEV off assembly lines, with deliveries to the first humans to reserve one coming up in April. The price for the 2012 Karma remains a mighty $95,900, though if you ask our brethren over at Autoblog, that’s a bunch of pennies well spent. Fisker expects to start producing 1,500 Karmas per month starting in October and to then sell 15,000 a year from 2012 onwards.

Fisker Karma enters production on March 21st, our future shortly thereafter originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Feb 2011 04:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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