Puma Phone

Last month's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona wasn't dominated by only the big brands with the usual raft of cutting-edge smartphones. Sports lifestyle company Puma and Sagem Wireless instead showed us that a phone can be fun, and we are right there with them. The aptly named Puma Phone, we found out later, is manufactured by Flextronics, a company that also makes handsets for Microsoft and Motorola.

We don't deny the appeal of this cat since it's completely different, and it helps that the phone is driven by a brand everyone recognizes. Aimed squarely at the young and active crowd, the user interface is entirely custom-designed in-house. You get a silly on-demand digital Puma called Dylan which shows up on the screen demanding your affection, a sarcastic calculator that teases you, and a scratching turntable with the music player. The real draw, however, is the striking red scheme with bold, clearly represented (and playful) icons, and a solar panel around the back, which we'll come to later.

There's an entire suite of sports features on the Sports menu, which includes a pedometer, bike tracker, boat compass, alarm, stopwatch and a news feed reader that lets you keep track of your team's results. The bike tracker, for example, uses GPS to track your workout on a map and you can monitor your distance traveled and speed using the onscreen speedometer. The Favorite page, which is the center of the three-panel home screen layout, features three customizable shortcut icons. The Lifestyle menu comprises your typical phone functions. There are a picture/video gallery, Maps, Webkit browser, messaging and access to the online Puma community, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube. Adding to the fun and playful nature of the device are Puma icons (more like emoticons) that you can insert in your text messages.

The handset sports a 2.8-inch QVGA touchscreen, 3.2-megapixel camera with LED flash, geotagging features with Assisted-GPS, onboard accelerometer, built-in FM radio, microSD expansion card slot, front-facing video call camera and a 3.5mm audio jack. The quad-band GSM phone also supports HSDPA (7.2Mbps) /HSUPA (2.9Mbps) as well as Bluetooth 2.1 EDR connectivity.

The Puma Phone isn't the first handset with built-in solar-harnessing capabilities. In fact, it looks a lot like the Samsung Blue Earth we saw last year. The Puma Phone is quoted at a respectable 15 minutes of talktime or 2 hours of music playback for every hour in the sun. If you're using the cellular out in the open, you could theoretically run it indefinitely. A small icon above the solar panel shows when it is bright enough for juicing up. You can also find out how much you're getting out of solar power, calculated by the number of SMSes sent or minutes of music playback. On a full charge, standby time is about 14.5 days or 5 hours of talktime (2G) for the 880mAh lithium battery.

According to the sports apparel firm, the Puma Phone will be available in Europe next month and Asia in Q4 this year. The retail price is 420 euros, which should be cheaper when purchased with contract from a telco operator.