Even if it looks a little too much like a purse to be completely unisex, as the designers claim it to be, the idea is a snazzy one. The Urban Performer Unit is a handbag with slick crystallized controlling, allowing you to operate your iPod from the Swarovski crystal laced surface.

The crystals indicate the iPod’s functions, incorporating an emotional feel to a smart electronic handbag. The bag doesn’t only work with iPod’s, but with most any pieces of mobile gadgets, including your PDA or cellphone. The Urban Performer Unit will be available in Christmas 2008 for the price of about $517.80. (more…)

When we saw the BenQ-Siemens’ over-pimped EF-71 phone, we thought it was a joke. It wasn’t until Samsung announced collaboration with Swarovski then we realized there’s an actual market need. The Taiwanese just can’t seem to wait for those phones to come out, so they started Blinging up their own phones with fancy stickers, and they have to stick them -all-over- the phone. You can pretty much find them everywhere in Taiwan by now, the most expensive ones would be those made with Swarovski crystals. Jump for more glamorous shots.

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Samsung is one huge attention seeker. Today they presented 3 new phones for Softbank Japan, the 8.4mm thin W-CDMA 708SC candybar that looks like the GSM 820, but the screen is upped to 240×320 landscape (from 176×220), microSD slot is added and now supports up to 2GB. Camera is still at 2MP, but a subcamera for video conference is added. The 707SC II is a HSDPA folder with specifications that resembles that of the aforementioned 706SC, Samsung puts everything into a 11.8mm folder form that’s it. The 805SC is the world’s thinnest (13.5mm) DMB One-seg slider and runs on HSDPA network. Samsung will be partnering Swarovski to release crystal-mounted 707SC phones (pictured above). Expect the Picsel document viewer (MS Office, Adobe PDF), Bluetooth with A2DP as well as the English-Japanese-Korean dictionary will all come with these Samsung phones. Softbank said that hey should be ready this spring. More pics after the jump.

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