At CES, I got to see the first-ever Soleus phone, built by Taiwanese firm MSI, better known for their PC motherboards. The MSI 5608's interface doesn't look anything like Windows, which is one of the strengths of Soleus. There's a rotating wheel of icons you flip through to pick the function you want. Below that level, screens get a lot drier, though.

MSI's phone was an early prototype, so you have to take their feature list with a grain of salt. But they promise a range of Asian digital television standards, GPS, a touch gesture interface, an accelerometer, quad-band EDGE, Wi-Fi, a 2-megapixel camera and a 2.8", 240x432 display. They'll be targeting Asia first, with US and European models to follow. By the time it arrives in the US at the end of the year, it might have WiMAX.

All of this runs on a Samsung S3C 400 Mhz platform, with some hardware graphics acceleration involved. The phone will be ready for Asia by early March, MSI said.