I surely didn’t expect to find a review of the new Bang & Olufsen Serene over at the NYTimes.com but yet that’s exactly what I found just a few minutes ago while perusing the website. As many of you probably know by now, the Bang & Olufsen Serene is a obscenely expensive cell phone with a totally unique design. In fact it’s so unique you wouldn’t even think it was a cell phone at first glance. Yes it has a clamshell-esque design but that’s about it in terms of resemblence.

Features of the Bang & Olufsen Serene include a keypad that’s arranged around a navigation wheel, integration with BeoCom 2 and BeoCom 600 cordless telephones, speech recognition technologies, and a unique component layout that makes one rethink how a phone should look like. The display and the microphone are placed on the lower half of the shell while the circular keypad and the loudspeaker are placed in the upper shell.

Here’s the verdict from the NYTimes:

For its classiness, striking design and sound quality, the Serene would fly off the shelves at $500 or even $600. But holy cow: $1,275? Could it possibly be worth that kind of money?

Only if you’re wealthy, a connoisseur of fine design and skeptical that any real Apple phone is in the works.

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