Onyx Liscio
Available
now 26th February 2008
At Mobile Gazette, we love our
gadget packed mobiles. But there tends to be one big
problem - these feature packed handsets are all, well,
rather big when it comes to size. Sometimes
you don't want to carry a big phone, especially if you
are carrying a tiny-but-oh-so-chic handbag, or perhaps
you're wearing an inadvisably tight pair of trousers..
for whatever reason it is sometimes nice to have a second
phone that is a lot more compact.
So, step forward then the Onyx Liscio.
An ultra compact and very lightweight handset designed
specifically as a second phone.
The
oddly named Liscio weighs just 60 grams and measures
on 90 x 35 x 18mm. Compare that with 91 grams and 106
x 44 x 12mm for the popular Nokia
6300, or the 128 gram Nokia
N95 8GB and you can see how much smaller the Liscio
is (see the image on the left for a size comparison
with the Nokia 6300).
You might have guessed that the Onyx
Liscio makes a few compromises to keep the size down,
and you would be right. For starters, the screen is
only a 1.1" 96 x 96 pixel OLED display and there's
no digital camera on the back. As you would probably
expect from an ultra lightweight phone, the Liscio does
not support 3G, WiFi or GPS. There's no mention of data
support or a web browser, although the small screen
isn't really suited for web access.
But the compromises seem to be few and
far between. The Liscio has an MP3 player, FM radio,
Bluetooth, 128MB of internal memory plus a microSD slot
(currently with a 1GB card in the standard sales package),
USB 2.0 connectivity and easy-to-use media keys. The
Liscio comes with a wired stereo headset in the box,
and it also supports stereo Bluetooth.
The
Liscio's battery life is better than you might think
for such a small phone, and this will certainly be partly
due to the energy efficient OLED display. The 730 mAH
battery can provide up to 3 hours talktime, 8 days standby
time and 11 hours of music playback.
This is a very good looking handset
- the smooth and glossy exterior plus the large media
keys give the impression that the Liscio is a dedicated
multimedia player rather than a phone. It's certainly
a nice device to show off to friends, but perhaps surprisingly
there's no lanyard attachment for hanging the Liscio
around your neck.
The Onyx Liscio is designed to be a
second phone, and it is sold only as a SIM-free device
for about £130 in the UK from Blue
Telephony. The same handset can also be found as
the Mivvy Music for about €135 from Mivvy
to customers in Germany, Austria, Hungary, the Czech
Republic and Slovakia.
This is an unusual and attractive handset,
and it offers pretty good value for money too. It isn't
the first time that we have seen a mobile phone marketed
in this way, the Siemens
Xelibri range from a few years ago tried to do the
same thing.. but Siemens were probably a little ahead
of their time with the concept. Perhaps the Onyx Liscio
will have more success?
|
Onyx
Liscio at a glance
|
Available:
|
Now
|
Network:
|
GSM
900 / 1800 / 1900
|
Data:
|
Not
specified
|
Screen:
|
96
x 96 pixels, 65k colours
|
Camera:
|
No
|
Size:
|
Compact
monoblock 90 x 35 x 18mm
/ 60 grams
|
Bluetooth:
|
Yes
|
Memory
card:
|
microSD
|
Infra-red:
|
No
|
Polyphonic:
|
Yes
|
Java:
|
Not
specified
|
GPS:
|
No
|
Battery
life:
|
3 hours talk / 8 days standby
|
|
|