T-Mobile is pitching its against the likes of Apple and Creative with a new smart phone specifically (nominally) designed for digital music playback. The handset will ship initially in Germany, in November, the mobile phone network said this week.

The SDA Music handset is based on Windows Mobile 2003 for Smartphones, and features the usual 176 x 220, 65,000-colour display, VGA digicam, tri-band GSM/GPRS radio you'd expect from a consumer-oriented handset. It provides USB and Bluetooth connectivity.

The phone ships with 64MB of ROM and 32MB of RAM - hardly an iPod-beating amount. There's a Mini SD card slot in there, so presumably T-Mobile hopes users will store their songs there.

It's all pretty standard smart phone stuff so far. So too is the range of formats the handset supports: MP3, WMA, WAV, AMR-NB, Midi and SP-Midi playback software. What sets the SDA Music apart are the dedicated Play/Pause and Track Skip buttons on the front of the phone.

Measuring 10.8 x 4.7 x 2cm, the SDA Music weighs 100g. The 1050mAh battery provides charge sufficient for 240 minutes call time and 200 hours on stand-by. T-Mobile didn't say how long the battery will support continuous music playback.

It did say it will be charging €100 (£68/$123) for the handset with a 24-month contract, or €370 (£253/$454) without a contract. As yet there's no word on availability outside Germany. ®

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