Maria Sharapova now Sony Ericsson's global ambassador

She's turning 21 in April this year, loves Snickers bars and was in Singapore recently for an exhibition match with Anna Chakvetadze. She's none other than Russian tennis star, Maria Sharapova.

The highly profiled player today pledged her allegiance to Sony Ericsson. Besides undertaking a series of new consumer-brand campaigns off the court, Sharapova will also be working with the Japanese-Swedish company's designers on "a range of products and accessories," according to the press release.

Guess what phone she's using now? The Sony Ericsson W350i. What did you expect?

Correction: We were just alerted to the press release dated 8 January that Canon USA has extended its global marketing relationship with Maria Sharapova until 2010. Changes have been made to the original article.

Philips Xenium lets you talk forever (almost)

The one thing that impresses us most about Philips' Xenium range of mobile phones is its uber-long battery life, some models with a standby time of up to two months on a single full charge. Of course, the actual performance is dependent on each individual's usage pattern. Suffice to say, that amount of uptime on a handset is still pretty darn long.

So when we got news that there's a new Xenium 9@9k on the block with a talktime of 17 hours and standby time of up to two months, we weren't surprised. The rest of the features are pedestrian and pale in comparison to the impressive battery life. For the record, the 9@9k also plays MP3 music (35 hours straight on a single charge), comes with an FM radio and a microSD expansion card slot.

There's also the Xenium 9@9u with a slightly inferior standby time of up to one month and maximum talktime of 8 hours, but comes with a marginally better feature set. That includes quadband GSM connectivity, Bluetooth stereo A2DP, a 2-megapixel camera, FM radio and a microSD card slot.

Both phones are currently available in countries like Hong Kong, Malaysia and Indonesia.

Pictured is the Xenium 9@9k

Neonode plans to bring N2 to Asia

We've written about Neonode's N2 before, but availability info was very much up in the air at that point of time. Well, things look a little brighter now that we know the handset may be coming to Asia, though the Swedish company didn't reveal any more details. The tiny touchscreen phone (47 x 77 x 14.7mm, 60g) is currently being showcased at CES. Features include a 2-inch 176 x 220-pixel optical touchscreen display, quadband GSM network connectivity, 2-megapixel fixed focus camera, miniSD expansion card slot and a 3.5mm audio jack via an adapter.

iriver dabbling with phones in the US

Well, this piece of news isn't meant for our audience, but we thought you might still might want to know (for bragging rights). iriver has been actively hawking its wares at this year's CES and, among them, include a GSM phone for the US market. According to PC Mag, the handset will come with a generous 3-inch 480 x 272-pixel touchscreen display and a Linux-based user interface complete with all the fancy swiping, flicking tricks of the iPhone.

Everything's still pretty iffy for now and it's not clear whether the handset will sport Wi-Fi. Other features include 4GB of flash memory, 2-megapixel camera, GPS, Adobe Flash player and GPS. One thing's for sure, though: It will have 3G connectivity.

Someone please tell iriver that Asia is a pretty big market, too?

Source and picture: PC Mag | Via Engadget

Sony Ericsson blings it with the T650i

When you're in Sin City, you're almost automatically excused after committing rounds of debauchery. You'd may even welcome the "Precious Gold T650i" that is outfitted with 24-carat plating complementing a rose-tinted keypad and borders on looking gaudy. There's no mention of when it'll be available this side of the world, but our sources told us we should know by the end of this month. When/if that happens, the Hilton-esque handset will sport a 3.2-megapixel autofocus camera, Bluetooth stereo for piping music to your cans and a fancy mineral glass LCD screen, which we assume wouldn't interest you at all.

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