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?