Siemens CL75

Discontinued
9th March 2005
See the Siemens CL75 Poppy here

The Siemens CL75 is a "girlie phone" that's fabulous to look at, even if at heart it's really quite a simple handset.

Siemens are good at packaging fairly standard components in high fashion designs like this, and the concept of the CL75 is a little like Siemens' earlier creation, the Xelibri 6. Of course, nothing can really out-girlie the Xelibri 6, but the CL75 does a good job and is a much better phone.

First the technical stuff – the CL75 is a tri-band GSM phone with GPRS, a 128x160 pixel TFT main display in 262,000 colours, an external display with 96x64 pixels in 65,000 colours, a VGA resolution camera, push-to-talk, instant messaging, a WAP 2.0 browser, Java and polyphonic.

But really, the CL75 isn't going to sell because of technical features – it's going going to buy it because it looks good. At launch it will be available in "Silk Flower Red" plus another colour combination, with two more variants and a "special edition" planned. The main screen is reflective and can be used as a travel mirror (reminiscent of the Xelbri 6 again).

This isn't a particularly compact phone – at 90 grams and 87x44x23mm it's larger than many, but the antenna is neatly tucked away inside the housing which means that it won't snag while in a handbag. Talktime is up to 3 hours with a maximum of 8 days standby.

The Siemens CL75 should be available from Q2 2005 and with other editions planned after that, priced somewhere in the mid-range tier.

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