Mention Swiss-made bearings, custom engineering, tungsten-carbide coated gears and a mirror-polished finish, and you’d be forgiven for thinking we were referring to a luxury watch. Instead, all these features and more are present in Motorola’s latest wacky handset.

Motorola's Aura: opens with a sliding face

The first thing to mention about Aura is its circular 1.5in LCD display, around which the phone’s top section slides open - in a clockwise motion – to reveal the keypad underneath. This motion’s made possible thanks to 130 precision-engineered ball bearings.

Unfortunately, Aura isn’t so advanced in terms of connectivity. It does offer quad-band GSM connection, but doesn’t support 3G – so you’ll be stuck with slower Edge-based connections. Wi-Fi isn’t available, but Bluetooth is.

A two-megapixel camera is also pretty poor in a market where five megapixels and more are fast becoming the cameraphone norm. There’s only 2GB of on-board memory available and no mention of a Micro SD memory card slot.

Anyone remember the V70?

Aura supports a range of audio formats, including MP3 and AAC. It’ll also handle video capture and playback too.

The wacky talker measures about 47 x 96 x 18mm and will keep you talking for up to 7.3 hours, Motorola claims. Its standby life is around 400 hours.

Motorola said the Aura will be available later this year, but a priced hasn’t been flipped out yet.

Motorola Aura Photo Gallery

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