Here's a surprise - a couple of handsets bearing the BenQ-Siemens brand.. surprising because the collapse of the BenQ-Siemens business last year would indicate that this particular brand was now defunct.

Well, it's been a long time but after a 10 months gap parent company BenQ Mobile has rolled out two new devices with the promise of some more on the way.
BenQ-Siemens E52

The squared off design of the BenQ-Siemens E52 is very reminiscent of Siemens designed handsets - but underneath this is a pure BenQ device with little or no input from the old Siemens Mobile arm of the business.

Priced at around €130 or less, the E52 is a tri-band GSM phone with GPRS and Bluetooth, an MP3 player, FM radio, 1.3 megapixel camera and expandable memory using microSD cards. The display is a 1.8" 176x220 pixel panel in 262,000 colours.

So far the BenQ-Siemens E52 looks like an inexpensive, smart but fairly dull phone. One interesting twist though is that the E52 has a built-in laser pointer and it can even be used as a mouse in PowerPoint presentations via a suitable Bluetooth link. It's an unusual twist which shows that the E52 is aimed at business users.

It's quite a heavy phone at 122 grams, but it's hard to say where all the weight goes.. the battery life is pretty unremarkable at 4 hours talktime and it's not as though it's a 3G phone. At 102 x 45 x 15mm in size, the E52 is a fairly typical size for a business handset.