While BlackBerry smartphones have largely been eclipsed on the popularity front by the iPhone and the swarms of Android phones on the market, the ‘ol “CrackBerry” still has millions of addicts, er, fans. Why else would Porsche Design – the German sports car (and sedan, and SUV, and…) builder’s industrial design subsidiary – create a Teutonically chic new phone running the BlackBerry 7 operating system?
Sure, this isn’t Porsche Design’s first smartphone rodeo , but this latest communication Wündergizmo – called the P’9981 – is the most advanced smartphone to emerge from the firm’s Zell am See, Austria studio. So what else do you get besides BlackBerry OS 7 and all those shiny metal buttons?
The P’9981 features a 1.2 GHz processor, 24 bits of graphics processing power, and 8 gigabytes of built-in memory. The device’s storage capacity can be expanded to as much as 40 gigabytes via an SD card, which is a very good thing when you consider this baby can record HD video. There’s also a full QWERTY keyboard, though the Liquid Graphics display and Porsche Design -designed user interface mean you’ll probably only use it for texting and entering URLs and search terms.
Each P’9981 also has a special PIN number, so nearby P’9981 users will be super easy to find. Then you can meet up and discuss how much you love your phones’ forged stainless steel shell, genuine leather back, and approximately $2,000 MSRP. Okay, maybe you won’t love the two-grand price tag per se, but you’ll probably at least like the fact that that figure includes personal concierge service. Then again, you could buy an actual Porsche for $2,000. Granted, it would be a 924 or a 928 that has sun-baked paint, an interior that smells like a drug dealer’s armpit and leaks every kind of fluid you can buy at Pep Boys (and some you can’t), but an actual Porsche nonetheless. We know which we’d pick; how about you?
