Motorola Aura: The Phone that Thinks It’s a Watch

Love it or hate it, you have to respect Motorola for loosening the reins of design and announcing the premium Aura handset. (UPDATE: we knew it created déjà vu for some reason!) Inspired by high end watches, the phone’s switch blade design alone is driven by over 200 parts—130 of them ball bearings used to open the handset up to an estimated 100,000 times before failure.

The display is the product of fine crafting as well. Just 3.9cm in diameter, this “word’s first” circular mobile phone screen features 16 million colours and 300 dpi clarity, plus it’s coated with 62-carat sapphire crystal to prevent scratching.

Internally, the phone is quad band with GPRS and EDGE featuring 7.3 hours of talk time, 2GB of internal memory, AGPS and 2MP camera. And when it goes on sale December 4th, it’ll carry the hefty pricetag of $US2,000 (which, to be fair, is actually far less than a premium watch). See more pretty pictures over at Motorola’s site. [Motorola]