HaierMobiles.com - Haier P6 Pen Phone

I'm here in a plush office lobby, somewhere in Central London to pick up the latest offering by Chinese manufacturer Haier. It's a very '007' situation with marbled world maps on the wall, secret doors in mirrored walls, and I swear every person that walks past is a Bond villain intent on global domination.

Okay, that may seem a little over the top, but ever since the Haier P5 pen style mobile phone was launched last year, this previously unheard of state owned company has slowly been tightening its grip on the World. The introduction of the second phone in the pen style series is the adeptly named Haier P6 (like the Chinese, we like continuity, however unoriginal it may sound) and like any product that follows a true design classic, the P6 design team had to work flat-out to come up with a P6 better than its older brother.

If you are unfamiliar with the Haier range of pen style mobile phones, (I hear well-dwelling can be quite nice this time of the year) let me enlighten you: Surprisingly they are called pen style because they have the basic shape of a pen… or a long, slim elongated phone. We've heard them being called everything from thermometers to remote controls for air-conditioning units, which perhaps isn't surprising because Haier make them too.

The Haier P6 has a similar firmware to the P5, offering the standard features that you'd expect on most high-spec phones; polyphonic ringtones, speakerphone, digital dictaphone, games including the much loved Tetris and of course the ability to make calls and receive text messages. Like the P5, the P6 also has an inbuilt laser pointer but unlike the P5, the P6 has a class 2 laser pointer. One major problem with the older Haier P5 was its laser strength. The class 3 device was deemed to powerful to use in Europe (something to do with Bond villains, slabs of gold and British agents) and as a result all P5 lasers had to be deactivated. This problem is no more, and now business professionals and students everywhere can use their phones to make presentations or confuse household pets (NB: no animals were used in the production of this review)

Onto aesthetics; The Haier P6 has a deceptively plain & simple front profile. Most official photos only show the one side to the P6 and that's a shame. While the curvaceous buttons and polished silver screen housing certainly look good, the Haier P5's angular black housing and array of angled buttons retain an almost designer feel. But the Haier P6 is not to be underestimated; when we actually got our mitts on the P6 we were thoroughly surprised.

The all round build quality and solidity is outstanding, it feels as solid as a house and the increased (albeit not major) size and weight establish the P6 as an expensive piece of telecommunications equipment. The buttons operate with a soft yet solid touch, and as ever, the cobalt blue backlight pierces through them before slowly fading out and switching off to save battery life. The inclusion of a removable battery was much needed in the pen style phones and the P6 is the first in the range to feature this. Not only has a removable battery been included, but a more powerful unit lengthening the operation time and reducing charging frequency is now standard.

Finally, the side profiles of the P6 emphasise the fact that the Haier P6 is a phone to be admired from every angle: The chunky circular chrome laser housing at the bottom flows round to a colour coordinated rubberised left side. The right side is then accented by a polished silver stripe that marries the rubberised and chrome sections perfectly, resulting in a melting pot of style, elegance, class and technological brilliance.

It is clear then, that the tricky task of beating a class leader has been achieved with the P6. Not just by features, but more importantly, by pure build quality and attention to detail. Attention to detail that can only be envisaged by picking it up and using it for yourself. If a single word could be used to describe the Haier P6, it would be… German. The preciseness, the efficiency with which it operates and the aforementioned build quality and solidity. Think of your favourite Bavarian car manufacturer; the P6 is more likely to emerge from a factory in the German foothills than from a state-owned Chinese manufacturer operating from "Number 1 Haier Road, High-Tech District, Qingdao, China"

Maybe Haier's plans for global domination aren't that unrealistic after all; there is definitely something "vorsprung durch technik" about the P6 - Expect it to be invading the inner pockets of every business traveller (and style conscious Bond villain) within the next few months.