For our readers living in the UK, please let us know if you guys are just as batshit crazy for IKEA as we are. The Swedish furniture company will be offering cellphone service to 1.4 million “loyalty scheme members” and around 9500 employees. T-Mobile will be providing the actual service while IKEA is just slapping a name on it and calling it a service. It’ll work similar to Virgin Mobile with the “pay as you go” plan starting with a minimum £10 purchase.

No word yet if your cellphone comes wrapped up in a flat cardboard box with the charger sold separately.

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Sony’s new DoCoMo SO703i may come with GPS, TV, and music player functions, but what’s really interesting about these phones has nothing to do with the specifications. That distinction goes to the fact that one sniff of your phone could make you think about lunch. That’s right, the DoCoMo SO703i is available in 11 unique scents, like “apple pie” for instance. These scents are made possible by a replaceable strip located near the hinge. Each strip lasts for about 3 months, after which you can choose to replace it with any of the other available fragrances.

Is it a gimmick? Yes it is. But history has shown that gimmicks will move product. Unfortunately, those of us outside of Japan probably won’t have the honor of being duped by the DoCoMo SO703i anytime soon. More images are available after the break.

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There are a couple of companies with great potentials that never made it to become the big players in the mobile phone industry. Asus is one of them. Just take a look at the Z801, their newest triband GSM phone. Real leather, stainless steel, industrially-strengthened glossy surface are all used to construct this baby. I am sure it will sell, if you stick a SonyEricsson logo on top and flush it with their UI. With dual TFT screens, the Z801 will surely look good in dark. The rest of the functions aren’t shabby either, the camera is a 2 Megapixels CMOS, MP3 ringtones and Bluetooth A2DP profile are all supported. Internal memory is 64MB and you may expand it with microSD cards. The Z801 is over-priced at 530USD in Taiwan today, as a tradition of Asus, don’t expect the Z801 to come out of Taiwan any time soon.

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