Nokia 8800 Carbon Arte: It's this or a TV

It seems Nokia is rather partial to its luxury 8800 range and while we'd like to say the Nokia 8800 Carbon Arte is a welcome departure from its predecessors, we would be lying harder than a desperate estate agent.

This is another attractive yet ultimately boring phone that tries to allure wallet-bulging buyers with the increasingly tired combination of a preposterous price tag and high-end materials such as carbon fibre, metal and glass. It's not that we don't like it, we'd just prefer to see something a little less 'BMW interior' sometimes.

Features-wise you get a 3.2-megapixel camera, 3G, an OLED display and expandable memory. As with older models, Nokia says the Carbon Arte has an anti-fingerprint coating on it so you won't need to spend hours polishing -- and that's about it. There's not as much as you might expect in a luxury phone, but perhaps less is more -- or at least you'd hope so.

If you're a yak herder, thinking to yourself that with those kind of features and a fairly old design you're only going to have to trade in a few yaks, think again. The Nokia 8800 Carbon Arte will set you back around €1,100 SIM-free -- that's 868 of your precious pounds. To put that into perspective, you could buy a 42-inch plasma TV, such as the Panasonic Viera TH-42PX80B, for that money. Yikes is all we can say. -Andrew Lim