Lamborghini phone will drive you to poor house

(Credit: Tag Heuer)

If you like fast cars, you might get revved up by the Meridiist phone from luxury sports watch maker Tag Heuer. The company has teamed with Italian super sports car manufacturer Lamborghini to create the limited-edition phone, which flashes fancy dual LCD displays made from 60.5 carats of scratch-resistant sapphire crystal.

The phone's design references the Lamborghini Murcielago down to its signature on the battery cover--the same one as on the Murcielago LP 640's V12 engine block. The device has a hand-brushed stainless steel case and backlit mechanical stainless steel keypad customized with Automobili Lamborghini's trademark Taurus bull on the steel central button.

The Meridiist measures about 4.5 inches by 1.8 inches by a little more than half an inch, giving it something of a 2002 aesthetic, but it does boast above-average battery life--seven hours of talk time or 28 days of standby power. Otherwise it has standard specs, like a WAP 2.0 Web browser and a 2-megapixel camera.

In tribute to the year Automobili Lamborghini was founded, 1,963 of the quad-band Bluetooth phones will be sold worldwide.

You can reserve a Meridiist in different colors of real leather or alligator skin, but the fact that we're not seeing a price listed anywhere on the Tag Heuer site makes us think we're better off sticking with our Ford Explorer handset.

[tekwiz4u]

I think financing is available to qualified buyers.

[maynm002]

If you click through the reserve here section they discretely display in the lower right hand corner "suggested retail price $7 500." I know it seems like I a joke, and it is very funny, but that's actually what they suggest the price tag should be. HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA!!!!!!

[Howardhorst2009]

I don't get it. It almost looks like a freebie phone that you get for signing up for a new account. If you can afford to spend $7,500 on a phone (as another post suggests), get an iPod/Android/Pre and then $7,200 worth of apps instead of looking like a dork holding a brick to your ear.

[mythrilfan]

Guys, you don't get it. The whole *point* of it is that it costs that much. It's not the specs or even the design. It's that if you buy one of these, you'll feel better about yourself, because nobody else can buy one. Yes, you're an idiot to buy one, but that's a completely different issue.

[topio]

Not the first "Önly Bling" phone and certaily not the last and if they sell half of them they will have made more than 100 times what they spent building the whole lot of them