If you are one of the diminishing population of householders in need of a landline you can have a phone handset provided free by Telstra (or Optus), buy a multi-handset cordless jobbie for a couple hundred bucks from your local electrical retailer, or go all posh with a $1595 Bang & Olufsen BeoCom 2.
A design classic, it is elegant and European and we love it, even though the two-column keypad is absurd for when, you know, you actually need to dial a number. For a design company, B&O can sure get it spectacularly wrong (the circular keypad of its Serene mobile phone is another case in point), but hey, sometimes style over substance is A-OK with us.
Anyway the BeoCom 2 is nothing new, being first marketed in 2002, so why is it appearing here as news? Well, as B&O breathlessly describes in its press release, the BeoCom’s 2 current six-colour scheme (white, grey, black, yellow, natural aluminium, blue) has been updated with (cue fanfare) a high polish finish and a new colour, red.
That’s no biggie, you think, until you consider what it takes to achieve this new super-shiny finish, the details of which are reproduced for your reading pleasure below (see ‘Powerful polish’).What’s more, the new colour finishes are characterised by what B&O calls “a taut exclusive tone that signals the present – but with enough edge for long-term relevance” Ummm, right..
