Mobile Phones & Deals Blog UK

Fashion phones are no longer reserved for the rich and famous, as more and more designer companies sign deals with the mobile phone manufacturers the UK market is seeing new and exciting handsets as a more common phenomenon.

Big designer clothing manufacturers such as Prada already have branded mobile phones available after collaborating with LG Electronics to produce the LG Prada and D&G (Dolce and Gabanna) have also teamed up with the mobile manufacturer Motorola to release the Motorola V3i D&G Gold Edition.

More recently another well known clothing designer Ted Baker worked with Samsung to launch the Samsung L760 Ted Baker phone and now a new designer more famous for their handbags has entered the market.

Mandarina Duck was created by two childhood friends, already long-standing business partners, after they decided to branch into leather wear taking their inspiration from a brightly-plumed oriental duck that symbolised happiness and loyalty, after almost thirty years, Mandarina Duck continues to be original and independent, but also modern, coming up with new products as well as new routes to market, in this case three new designer mobile phones.

Alcatel and Mandarina Duck, makers of luxuriously designed handbags and laptop cases, have come together to launch a range of limited edition fashion phones called Mandarina Duck Phones that will make up part of a limited collection exclusive from The Carphone Warehouse.

More of a fun filled fashion phone for the ladies than a serious device, the Mandarina Duck, complete with Duck logo on the back casing and available in three colourful tones, Mandarina Duck Cherry Red, Mandarina Duck Purple (Lilac) and Mandarina Duck Green, is made up of a partly rubberised casings that lighten the mood of the day or night to fill it with laughter and joy on one’s travel’s.

The bold clamshell features a bobble charm to add to its fun filled nature and an innovative bag clip that saves you from having to search around in the bottom of your bag trying to find your phone.

Each phone features its own colour coordinated display and graphics and features a built-in MP3 music Player which can be filled with new music tracks by either uploading from a PC or downloading direct from the mobile internet, a digital camera with zoom function for close up photography and support for video record and playback, wap browser for surfing the web, Bluetooth wireless connectivity with A2DP Stereo support for wireless connections to headsets and hands free car kits as well as wireless transfer of music, video and picture files to compatible devices and can operate in Flight mode with up to 10 hours of music playback meaning that when flying the handsets network connection is switched off so as not to interfere with the planes electronics but still allows access to key features such as the MP3 player and games.

Internal memory is 10MB which can be expanded with the use of microSD card expansion up to 1GB to provide plenty of storage capacity and the phone is preloaded with embedded Mandarina Duck images and animations for complete designer customisation.

The new Mandarina Duck Purple phone represents a new era in mobile telecommunications as more top named brands strike deals with the manufacturers and networks there are going to be many more collaborations producing even more innovative and stylish mobile devices.

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Mandarina Duck Green Deals

Mandarina Duck Purple Deals

Mandarina Duck Red Deals

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The prospect of free calls from a mobile phone is certainly a tempting one, although the way that mobile phone tariffs are structured and promoted these days might lead one to believe that they have already been available.

Network operators are clever in the way that they market their tariffs by including what they call ‘free’ minutes and text, when looked at from a different angle though the consumer soon finds that these are not ‘free’ calls or text messages at all but instead they have to pay a monthly line rental in order to be allocated the ‘free’ time.

This has always been different with Sykpe calls, users can make calls to other Sykpe users completely free of charge making this a very attractive proposition when integrated into a mobile phone and so we come to the new Skypephone from 3, or to give it its official name the 3Skypephone. (All one word)

This new device looks like a pretty unremarkable mobile phone until it is investigated further, the exterior of the phone comes in three different colours, White / Pink, White / Blue and Black and all feature a big dedicated Skype button located prominently below the main display.

The phone is actually very lightweight at 68g and its overall dimensions fit that of a good quality handset at 100 x 44 x 13.6 mm, the colours are not overall paint jobs, the White / Blue and White / Pink are merely accents that surround the handset, the majority of the handset is coloured white whereas the Black version is completely black.

The main display is a substantial 2 inches making for easy text reading and the buttons are well spaced, this is a good thing as the phone comes with Skype IM or instant messaging which most users will have used from a PC with a full qwerty keyboard, in the SkypePhones case the messages have to be inputted via the handsets keypad very much like standard texting.

This new handset features a 2.0 megapixel camera, a good lens that can capture quality still pictures and short video clips plus photo editing software for touching up those works of art.

The 3 SkypePhone is a 3G device although it does not offer the secondary camera found on a lot of similar handsets for video calling, the 3G technology allows for fast download speeds and access to a multitude of mobile content, information and entertainment. Users can download new games, ringtones, wallpapers and themes, watch new movie trailers before they are released and catch up with the days news and sports headlines with streaming media.

There is also an MP3 player which can be filled with music tracks from a PC or downloaded direct from the mobile internet via 3G before being arranged into playlists, the player also incorporates a built-in equalizer for better sound quality.

The 3SkypePhone is a significant move towards internet based, mobile technology, there are other VOIP enabled devices available but none of them incorporate the technology and speeds of 3 Mobile or do they offer the inexpensive tariffs or already configured Skype service.