For safety’s sake, most of what we hear about phones and cars in the same news piece is about not dialing or texting while driving. The rest is usually about connecting your phone to your car… so you don’t have to dial or text while driving. But once in a while it comes down to phones inspired by cars. Porsche Design has done a few, and so has Ferrari – with a range of manufacturers from Motorola to Vertu. The latest, however, is the product of Maranello’s partnership with Taiwanese computer firm Acer.
The tie-in has already spawned a number of laptop computers, but as phones get smarter and smarter, they’ve evolved into small computers to the point that computer companies are becoming some of the biggest players in the mobile phone market. Acer’s flagship model is the Liquid E, a touchscreen smartphone with a Snapdragon processor running Google’s Android 2.1 mobile operating system. Now they’ve done up a special edition for Ferrari, decked out all in Rosso Corsa and coming paired up with a similarly trimmed Bluetooth earpiece.
Aside from the racy color treatment, the Ferrari edition Liquid E comes emblazoned with the Prancing Horse badge surrounded by carbon fiber trim, a microphone cutout designed after the air intake on the side of a Scuderia Ferrari F1 car, and will surely come packed with Ferrari-themed wallpapers, icons, screen savers and ring-tones. The model’s just been unveiled at the Computex trade show, so no word on pricing just yet, but expect that to be suitably Ferrari-inspired as well.