SE-NSE Forums:

You’ve probably already seen the picture we leaked of the upcoming UIQ smart phone, named Paris. In this post, we’ll go through its design and briefly tell about some features.

The slider form factor is going to be the form factor of Paris. Sony Ericsson has picked out some very nice materials for us, such as the shiny, mirror-like front cover, and metal has been used on large parts of the phone. Paris is quite slim (16 – 18 mm?), and we apologize for posting a picture that made it look a bit thicker than it really is.

The front of the phone holds a large touch display (with UIQ 3.3 supporting WQVGA, VGA & WVGA), a video call camera above the display, a minimalistic D-pad and two call keys making use of the same material as the rest of the front. This is quite nice, actually, and does affect the overall look of the device, more than you’d probably think it would.

Slide open the phone to reveal a full QWERTY keyboard beneath the exclusive-looking front. The keyboard consists of a number of multifunctional keys, like on M600 & P1, with the left part painted white and the right part painted black. This also looks much better than what your first thoughts may be. The phone is quite wide, making great room for this keyboard (and the large flush display, which pretty much fills out the device in width).

The back of Paris seems to have been made of metal. It looks quite nice, yet very simple. A sliding lens cover is protecting the 5 mega pixel camera on the top of the backside.

So, let’s talk about features. Paris features W-LAN 802.11b/g, Bluetooth, 3G and USB 2.0 cable transfers. It has a built-in GPS and comes bundled with Google Maps pre-installed, and we’re quite sure that WayFinder 7.0 will also be pre-installed on this device. The default web browser in Paris is Opera Mobile 9.5, as on other UIQ 3.3 devices.

So, when will we leak more pictures and what about that video, you guys talked about? Well, all in good time, but for now I can say that we plan to leak a set of three more pictures. One showing the shiny front (tomorrow), one showing the keyboard (Wednesday, next week) and one showing the backside of the phone (Friday, next week). The coming pictures will be of higher quality than the first posted one, but mind you that they are still screen shots from a video, so it’s far from perfect. Furthermore, we hope to be able to post a full video of this product within the next 2-3 weeks, but this has yet to be decided. You may be wondering why we’ve decided not to give it all at once. The reason is quite simple – this little ‘game’ we’re playing has to be fun for both us and Sony Ericsson, meaning that we do not wish to hurt Sony Ericsson in any way by publishing crucial pictures of upcoming phones.

I hope you found this at use, and that we’ve answered most of your questions.