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BenQ Mobile officially announced their new BenQ-Siemens EF51, which they label as a "music device with an integrated mobile phone."  Just like they describe it, this device looks like a digital audio player with the navigational keys located conveniently on the front.  At first glance you wouldn’t even know that it had the ability to make and receive calls, but if you flip open the front panel of the device you will reveal a phone keypad.

BenQ has really offered support for a good range of media by allowing you to play the following file formats: WMA, MP3, AAC, AAC+.  It even has an integrated FM radio which you can listen to and/or record.  They have also included a "Speech-to-Music" feature that allows you to simply say the name of a song to start it playing.

The phone functionality sounds like it will be fairly basic by today’s standards, but that’s fine with me as all I really need is the ability to make calls.  The device also features a 1.3 megapixel camera.

It sounds like the EF51 will be a promising device, and I really look forward to seeing the public response to it when it releases next quarter.  It would be nice to see a hefty amount of on-board memory for the audio player functionality, but at least there are miniSD cards with high enough capacities to satisfy the needs of most consumers for a device like this.

Press Release: BenQ Mobile

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Chris Leckness is the Owner/Administrator of Mobilitysite. He is a Microsoft MVP, Mobile Devices and a member of the exclusive focus group, Mobius. Chris runs a Mobilitysite, GotZune, and a few other smaller sites and blogs. His personal blog is chris.leckness.com.