Hardware

Porsche Design starts as it means to go on, with an oversized box first presenting the P’9981 and its desk-stand in one dense foam layer, before revealing different chargers for near-global use, USB cable and headphones, various documentation and your exclusive technical support card, complete with PIN, to access freephone assistance. It’s not quite Vertu’s Concierge, mind; the team will help you set up your P’9981 and figure out its quirks, but not book you theater tickets.

The smartphone itself is certainly distinctive. RIM basically handed over the key parts of its Bold 9900 flagship, and Porsche Design dressed them up in a Dynasty-era suit, shoulderpads and all. It’s a resolutely aggressive, blunt design, all sharp edges and squared-off corners, with plenty of metal and metal-effect plastic, and it’s heavy too, feeling twice its actual 155g weight in the hand.

Porsche Design itself gets top billing, its name engraved into the brushed stainless-steel bar above the display; RIM’s BlackBerry logo is relegated to just below the earpiece, above the 2.8-inch 640 x 480 touchscreen. The display is bright and crisp, though lacks the color saturation of an AMOLED, while the touch response is good. The metal bar continues around the edge of the P’9981 – though with a polished mirror finish, rather than brushed – though the keyboard itself is plastic.

Porsche Design P’9981 hands-on:

BlackBerry devices are famed for their keyboards, in fact you could construct a reasonable argument that it’s QWERTY text-entry that has kept the company afloat the past few years. Porsche Design does away with the 9900′s ‘board – one, we decided, of the best on the market – and replaces it with a heavily-stylized version with pronounced ridges. It’s not a bad keyboard – the spacing is good, as it spreads across the entire 67mm width of the phone, and the keys are clicky and responsive – but it’s definitely a step back from what the donor BlackBerry offers.

It’s also unevenly illuminated, with the backlighting focused in two patches that leave the center column of letters dimmer than the rest. No great functional issue, and you can still see them in low-light conditions, but it’s a noticeable flaw and one – since the backlighting is often active when the P’9981 is docked in its charger-cradle – you’re presented with all the time.

Sandwiched in-between the keyboard and the touchscreen is the usual row of call, menu and navigation buttons. They’re large and plasticky, and rock somewhat unnervingly under your finger. In their midst is the optical trackpad, which doubles as a select button, and is swiftly responsive. The left edge of the phone offers the 3.5mm headphones socket and a microUSB port, while the right has volume keys flanking a mute button (that doubles as a play/pause button in the media app) and a camera shortcut (that can be reprogrammed). On the top there’s a lock button.

If the front of the P’9981 is Terminator sturdy, the back is oddly unreassuring. An ingot of metal bears the 5-megapixel camera – which supports 720p but uses EDoF fixed-focus rather than auto-focus – and single LED flash, but the rest is a plastic panel that, despite being covered with leather, feels unduly cheap in comparison to the rest of the phone. There’s a little flex around the camera section, and the panel itself doesn’t click reassuringly into place as we might’ve hoped.

Peel it off, and you can see the antenna stuck to the back – connected with two discrete pins just above the Porsche Design branded 1,230 mAh battery – as well as the microSD card slot to augment the 8GB of internal memory. You’ll need to pull out the battery to swap the SIM card. This European unit has dualband 3G/UMTS (for up to 14.4 Mbps downloads and up to 5.76 Mbps uploads, network depending), quadband GSM/EDGE, WiFI a/b/g/n (with 2.4/5GHz support), Bluetooth and NFC, along with GPS, a digital compass, accelerometer and twin microphones for noise cancellation. Like the Bold 9900, the Porsche Design P’9981 runs BlackBerry 7 on a single-core Qualcomm MSM8655 1.2GHz processor, paired with 768MB of RAM.

Software

RIM has hung its long-term hopes on BlackBerry 10, the QNX-based OS for phones and tablets expected to debut by the end of this year. Unfortunately, that leaves the P’9981 running BlackBerry 7, just as on the Bold 9900, and it’s a platform that’s seriously showing its age compared to iOS and Android.

Porsche Design, as the name might predict, makes no modifications to the software itself beyond an ill-advised icon redesign. The paired down iconography is certainly in keeping with the rest of the P’9981, but it also leaves app menus confusing: you have to make a conscious effort to tell the difference between each icon. It’s something you’ll no doubt get more adroit at handling, the longer you live with the handset, or indeed you can change the skin altogether.

Beyond that, our primary frustration with BlackBerry 7 is its general sense of being a patchwork platform: some aspects feel relatively fresh, but other areas feel like they’ve been dragged over from RIM’s OS several years back. The text-based elements of the UI are generally the swiftest but also the points that feel most dated in comparison to rival software; in contrast, BlackBerry App World is sluggish and the BlackBerry Maps app is a lesson in frustration compared to Google Maps or Nokia Maps.

RIM has worked hard on the internet experience in BlackBerry 7, and it’s certainly improved from earlier iterations. You still get a throwback mouse cursor, though we came to appreciate it more after finding how much finger-navigation obscures the touchscreen. Pinch-zooming in the browser works, but that compact display also makes it feel clumsy.

As always, the email experience is the primary reason for using a BlackBerry, though it’s at its best if you’re an enterprise customer with a BlackBerry Exchange Server. If you’re on the Gmail train then you’ll have to use IMAP – Google discontinued its Gmail for BlackBerry app late last year – though there’s the Enhanced Google Mail Plug-in from RIM itself that adds spam and archive support, integrates Gmail inbox searches with BlackBerry 7′s universal search, and imports your contacts. Still, the best Gmail experience continues to be on Android in our opinion, with iOS following behind that.

We’ve covered BlackBerry 7 more in our Bold 9900 review, but the long and short of it is that the OS feels dated and is well overdue a replacement. BlackBerry 10 can’t come soon enough.

Camera

5-megapixels is midrange but acceptable for a smartphone, particularly one with business aspirations like the P’9981, but the fixed-focus is a disappointment. Not a surprising one – the Bold 9900 used EDoF after all – but still another black mark against the Porsche phone.

It means you’re limited in how close you can get with your macro shots, and in general images lack crispness in comparison to auto-focus cameras. Color balance is solid, and there’s a nice amount of detail in shots from the P’9981, but unlike, say, the iPhone 4S or Galaxy S II, you wouldn’t want to rely on the BlackBerry for all of your photography needs.

As for video, 720p is your high-definition maximum but the ensuing clips are good. Colors are accurate, if a little muted, and the digital image stabilization is neither ineffectual nor over-aggressive and helps smooth out a shaky hand. We found the sheer heft of the P’9981 also helped on that front too. Recorded clips can be sent via Bluetooth or WhatsApp, or uploaded to YouTube, though not emailed directly from the camcorder app.

Porsche Design P’9981 720p HD Video Sample:

Phone and Battery

Just behind email performance in the Big BlackBerry Book of Achievements is traditionally voice call quality and battery life: on this, the P’9981 drops one of the balls. Calling quality is great, with a loud earpiece and speaker for hands-free use, crisp – but not overly-processed – background noise reduction, and tenacious grip on a mobile signal. We also like how both your mobile network and current WiFi SSID are shown in the status bar.

Unfortunately, whereas at one time BlackBerry devices could be expected to run for days, the P’9981 follows in the Bold 9900′s metaphorical footsteps and tarnishes the family tradition. The 1,230 mAh battery may be Porsche Design branded but it’s otherwise exactly the same powerpack as the 9900 uses, and it’s simply not up to the challenge of the 1.2GHz processor.

RIM does its best to hide that fact, underclocking the chip most of the time so that you’re running on a fraction of those cycles, but step beyond simple email and you’ll find calls, web browsing, photography and third-party apps all take their toll. Left to its own devices and the P’9981 will run for a couple of days, even with email updating in the background, but actually use it as you might a rival smartphone and you’ll struggle to finish a day. The desk charger cradle does at least make topping up the juice more straightforward.

Wrap-Up

It’s hard to imagine the Porsche Design P’9981 convincing the everyman: its severe styling is too divisive, BlackBerry 7 OS questionable, and general specifications uncompetitive in places. Then again, the everyman isn’t the limited edition BlackBerry’s target audience. Like Vertu and “luxury” editions of other manufacturers’ phones, the appeal of the P’9981 is more about who hasn’t got it than who wants it.

$2,350 is a ridiculous amount of money for a smartphone. A quarter of that gets you an iPhone 4S or a Galaxy Nexus, either of which outclass the P’9981 on functionality, usability and – many would argue – style. However, just as Porsche Design borrowed the Dynasty shoulderpads, the P’9981 is the cellular equivalent of Alexis Carrington: brash and unforgivingly blunt, an unapologetic backhanded slap to the face of anybody who thinks their mainstream handset makes them special.

The rest of us will continue to buy iPhones, and Android phones, perhaps even some Windows Phones, and wait to see whether RIM can relaunch itself in Q4 with BlackBerry 10. The biggest problem with the P’9981 isn’t its love-it-or-hate-it design, or its mediocre camera, or even its insane price tag: it’s the fact that it highlights just how tired BlackBerry 7 is. In the end, even $2,350-worth of metal and leather and Porsche branding can’t hide that.

We’re used to seeing larger displays as in the Galaxy S II or iPhone 4S when it comes to the latest and greatest. But the Porsche Design, like the other BlackBerry QWERTYs out there, offers a 2.8″ touch screen with a 640×480 resolution. If you were to spend $2,400 on a smartphone, wouldn’t it make sense to ensure it has a decent camera? Its 5MP rear shooter most definitely can’t compete with a few others currently in production. People have even started bragging about a possible 12MP camera included in the Galaxy S III.

So what it boils down to is brand name. After all, someone that plans on purchasing a smartphone at such a price isn’t in it for the specs, but rather its uniqueness. It’s bound to turn some heads with the built-in leather battery cover and custom theme. The Porsche Design P’9981 is only available in the UK and Middle East for the time being, but should make its way to the US soon enough.

[via Yahoo! Tech]

Porsche also notes that the car weighs less than previous generations and has a wider track and a longer wheelbase. Less weight will up performance and wider track and longer wheelbase should help handling as well. The new cars also get electromechanical power steering to improve driving dynamics. The base Boxster gets more power with a 2.7L displacement engine that has 265hp, ten more than the hp rating for the previous version. The Boxster S gains 5hp to 315.

Dispute the power and size gains of the car, the new Boxsters are more fuel-efficient than past models as well. The 2013 Boxster is claimed to be 15% more fuel efficient in the European cycle. The larger size gives more space inside the car and the interior is all new as well. The car will come with a 6-speed manual or the 7-speed Doppelkupplungsgetriebe (PDK) gearbox. The PDK is the most fuel efficient of the two. The 0-60 time for the standard Boxster is 5.4 seconds and the Boxster S can hit the same speed in 4.7 seconds. The cars will hit the US in early summer 2012 at $49,500 base for the Boxster and $60,900 base for the Boxster S.

The P’9981 is passing through the FCC with support for AT&T’s GSM 850/1900 and WCDMA bands II and V. The filing also reveals that it supports Bluetooth, WiFi, and NFC. Previous announcements have confirmed that the P’9981 will sport a 1.2GHz processor, HD video recording, 24-bit graphics, and advanced sensors for augmented reality technology.

Love it or hate it, the industrial angular design of the P’9981 is quite striking and will certainly be an attention-grabbing device in your hands. And if that’s what you’re going for, you’ll have to fork over about $2,000 for it. However, an exact date of availability has not been announced yet.

[via Wireless Goodness]

Although the angular sharp look hasn’t generated very positive reactions so far, the device is intended to be a luxury edition BlackBerry, so for those who do like the look, you’ll probably have to pay dearly for the unique chassis. The device, otherwise, looks to be built similar to the 9900/9930 handset and features BlackBerry 7 OS, WiFi, 3G, and NFC.

The full details on the BlackBerry 9980 should be available in about a week as Porsche Design has issued invitations today to an unveiling event on October 27. The VIP event will take place in Dubai to preview an “exclusive collaboration between Porsche Design and BlackBerry.”

[via PocketNow]

To reiterate, this device has had more than a couple names since it first appeared: 9900 prototype 9980, BlackBerry Knight, R47, and Porsche Proceeding. This device appears to be running BlackBerry 7 OS, has Wi-fi, 3G connection, NFC, and a rather unique chassis. Sources for the video and the images say that this is a luxury edition BlackBerry device but have been less definitive with specs, release date, price, and everything else on this mystery handset.

Have a look at the video in this post as well as the images, then decide for yourself. While we’re on the subject, have a look at Vincent’s BlackBerry 9930 and see if you think such a device could use a shaved-down flat and blocked remix. The photos should let you know instantly that this is no ordinary phone, square buttons having lost quite a bit of their appeal over the past couple of years on mobile devices without a doubt. So what is it?

Porsche, that’s what your humble narrator is betting on. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time the high-class car brand had thrown their hat into the mobile device world. As it is at the moment, the folks at Porsche have created such minimal tech gadgets as the LaCie / Porsche external hard drive, the Fanatec Porsche 911 GT3 Racing Wheel for video games, and if you go all the way back to 2007, you’ll see one of their more heavily covered cellphone device designs in the Sagem P’9521 flip-phone which, as you can see all the way back in time, they’ve always been prone to choosing squareness and heftiness over smooth light curves.

Look over what we’ve got here and let us know: is this your scene?

Interesting to note: the photos and the video in this post appear to come from two different sources based on their watermarks, however if you take a look at the video you’ll see the same heart-shaped basket that you see in the photos quite plainly. Wacky!

[via BerryCN and via MAXpda]

This watch has very clean and classic lines with little to bling it up. The watch has a black band and face with white markings and hands with a red second hand. It shows the date as well. The face of the watch flips up to reveal a compass underneath. The case is made from titanium and the crystal is AR-coated sapphire.

That liquid compass in the bottom is removable, will work in both hemispheres, and has mirrors to make it viewable. Those mirrors click into place to let you see the compass from the side when the watch is on your wrist. It is water resistant to 50-meters. Pricing on the watch is unannounced, but it won’t be cheap.

[via Uncrate]

The lineup includes the LaCie Porsche Design Mobile Hard Drive (P’9220) and the LaCie Porsche Design Desktop Hard Drive (P’9230). They each feature a sleek aluminum frame design that is modern and purist for a very elegant piece of hardware that packs in all the performance under the hood, optimally regulates heat, and is 100 percent recyclable. The workmanship and aesthetic reflects the Porsche Design signature.

Performance-wise, the USB 3.0 hard drives are touted as the fastest on the market, clocking speeds three times faster than USB 2.0. Software comes with the drive for both PC and Mac that includes backup utilities, eco mode for power savings, password protection, and 10GB of Wuala secure online storage.

The LaCie Porche Design Mobile Hard Drive comes in 500GB and 1TB capacities with a 750GB model available exclusively through the worldwide Porsche Design Stores. However, only the 500GB model has pricing listed, currently at $104.99. The LaCie Porsche Design Desktop Hard Drive comes in 1TB for $119.99 and 2TB for $159.99. Both models will be available through the LaCie Online Store.

The picture you see here is a shot of that Porsche racecar steering wheel. It appears to be covered in alcantra, which is a great material for grip and comfort during long races or driving. This is one of the strangest looking steering wheels ever though with all the buttons and knobs on the thing. I’m not going to pretend to know what all of those buttons and knobs are for, but I can see a few labels I recognize.

The coolest of all the buttons though is the boost one you see near the thumb. Press that and the hybrid system kicks in to shoot the 911 racer around a competitor when needed. The thing that scares me about this wheel and the thought of me actually using it is all the buttons. I would totally hit one of those and blow the car up. I am constantly hitting the buttons on my Logitech racing wheel accidentally when playing Gran Turismo 5.

[via Wired]

Porsche also makes a SUV that is popular around the world called the Cayenne and the latest version of the Cayenne dubbed the S Hybrid has around for a while. The SUV may be a hybrid, but anything with the Porsche crest has to perform, and the Cayenne S does. The big SUV can hit 60mph in 6.1 seconds and has a top speed of 150 mph. The vehicle is rated for 20mpg in the city and 24 mpg on the highway by the EPA.

Those fuel efficiency figures might not sound that great when compared to other hybrids, but when you consider this is a performance vehicle it’s pretty impressive. The Cayenne S Hybrid has a combined power output of 380hp from a supercharged V6 combined with an electric motor. Porsche has announced that the Cayenne S Hybrid has qualified for a one-time federal tax credit of $1,800. The vehicle stickers for $67,700 before that credit is taken off the price. I’m not sure the sort of folks that can afford to spend nearly $70,000 on a SUV really need a tax credit.

SlashNEUTRALITY
You know that pesky little thing called Net Neutrality – aka the principal that service providers and governments should not be allowed to restrict content, sites, platforms, equipment and modes of communication through the internet? Well the UK Communications Minister Ed Vaizey is against that, saying today at a London telecommunications conference organized by the Financial Times: “the market should decide the extent to which service providers can charge for preferential content delivery and slow down other traffic.”

Enough said?

[Via Reddit]

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Conceptual Design for Porsche Smartphone is Sleek, Hot, Amazing [CONCEPT]
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To see more Daily Slash posts, click here: [The Daily Slash] or here: [SlashGear Morning Wrap-Up]

Porsche has been showing off a hybrid 911 race car that uses the battery power as a sort of boost for extra speed when needed. Porsche also showed off a sweet 918 Spyder hybrid car in Geneva this year. The sports car marker has stated that the 918 Spyder is going into production.

The concept had a 500hp V8 engine and a pair of electric motors good for 109hp each. Those electric motors were fed by lithium-ion batteries and the car could run 16 miles on electricity alone. Overall fuel economy for the supercar was 78mpg. Porsche hasn’t offered up any official pricing, but the car could be as much as $650,000 though you can offset $7500 of that thanks to Obama tax credits.

But inside each of those dials is a 1.5-inch cone that is actually a speaker. Then there is the piano black glass finish on the front complemented by the brushed aluminum covering the remainder of the product.

In the back there is a 3-inch active subwoofer which makes this a 3.1 unit in all. I presume that since it has the Porsche name on it the audio quality is at least mediocre if not fairly good for a shelf stereo unit. If you want on it will cost you £409 or a little over $800 USD, so it had better sound simply amazing, or have one of those boxer engines tucked away inside, wait, is that the wrong Porsche?

[via RedFerret]

However, it’s not all slick tires and agile roadholding: the dual-LED flash is still underpowered compared to the latest xenon technology found on rivals, and if you’ve got weak wrists then you may want to do some exercise before picking the P’9521 up since it weighs in at a hefty 137g (thanks to all that aluminium and mineral glass).

Most shocking, though, is the price – Sagem are saying £800 ($1,627) without contract – and while you couldn’t get the keys to a new Porsche for that, you could get a decent PC.  I think I’ll stick to the shoelaces.

Hands on with the Porsche P’9521 [Crave UK]

There is a 3.2MP cam built into the back of the phone, which appears to have either 2 LED lights or two flash bulbs or a combination of the two. The camera also has auto focus and digital zoom.

There is a freakin’ fingerprint reader built into this phone, that’s crazy. The talk time is 3 hours and some change, music playing time is closer to 7 hours, standby time is 240 hours. There are tons of media formats supported and A2DP Bluetooth profiles so your media needs should be covered. So what could be the downside? It is in very limited production, and as such, it will cost you roughly 1200 euros, and you thought the iPhone was pricey.

Sagem Porsche P9521 preview | Introduction [via letsgomobile]

The set is all wireless and comes with a steering wheel, set of pedals, gear shifter, and USB dongle all officially licensed from Porsche with logos on the USB dongle and steering wheel. Really it looks pretty nice, and may well be worth it cost.

The cost, since you’re wondering, is $350 for the set. Whereas the cheapest Porsche car you can get your hands on is the Boxter for a little more than $45,000 you can get your hands on the wheel for the cost of a PS3, a racing game, and $350 for this set.

Porsche licenses gear for PS3 [via Crave]