If you are into luxury items, then you have to know about Nokia's Arte line. It's the company's luxury phone series, designed for business men, celebrities, fashion designers and all other kind of VIPs who spend a lot of time in the spotlight. But hey, if you're not in the spotlight, but have a ton of money, you can still buy the device.

The company has recently released a new Arte phone, completing the series with a gold and leather newcomer, since gold has always signified wealth and high class, while leather has been the mark of the professional business men for quite some time now. With the addition of the new Nokia 8800 Gold Arte, the company is trying to compete with devices like the Motorola Aura and the Vertu.

Since most people who actually buy these extremely expensive mobile phones often don't require advanced multimedia functions, manufacturers try to keep the multimedia features to a minimum, and they do what they can to raise the bar on quality and design. The 8800 Gold comes with the Series 40 5'th Edition and Feature Pack 1. It is one of the richest (application-wise) Series 40 phones and hosting the new user interface is a 2-inch, 240x320 pixels resolution OLED display with 16 million colors. The entire frame of the phone is gold-platted with 18 carat gold, while the top of the keypad cover is partially padded with white leather.

The phone's weight has been kept to a minimum, namely 150 grams (battery included), and that's an important factor for most high class celebrities. It also comes with tri-band support for 900, 1800 and 1900 MHz mobile networks. Some business men might not like the 3.2 megapixel camera because they aren't always allowed to have a phone with a camera on them (security policies and stuff).

The digital video and audio players provide impressive file support, with H.263, H.264, MPEG4 on the video side and MP3, MP4, AAC, eAAC+ and WMA for the audio part. Bluetooth is a good addition to the phone, since it is an easy and fast way to share small files. Nokia has attempted to achieve elegance and style, while trying to maintain some of the most basic multimedia functions with the new 8800 Gold Arte, and I have to say that they have succeeded.  














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