Land Rover will unveil a ruggedised mobile phone at this week's
GSMA Mobile World
Congress in Barcelona.
The Land Rover S1 is the first in a series of projects by Land
Rover and California-based phone maker
Sonim. The phone will be
fully submersible, Bluetooth-compliant and certified to withstand
salt, fog, humidity, transport and thermal shock, as well as a 1.6m
drop onto concrete.
It includes a two-megapixel camera, assisted GPS and the
Opera-mini web browser. The phone has a three-year warranty and
same-day replacement service.
The official launch of the S1 is slated for summer 2009. Sonim
and Land Rover will be co-marketing the phones in 40 countries.
Land Rover engaged Sonim in December 2008 as its licensing
partner for a line of rugged, waterproof cell phones aimed at
outdoor adventurers.
Sonim also makes an end-to-end mobile VoIP platform that
delivers high-performance push-to-talk services on GPRS, UMTS,
EVDO, Wi-Fi and Wimax data networks.