Motorola has launched the Pebl-inspired U9 music phone that was forecast way back in July. The compact curvacious sliderphone sports a bright 1.5in OLED external display to give it that MP3 player feel.

Motorola's U9: open and shut

As a phone, the U9 is a quad-band GSM/GPRS/Edge devices. Opening the clamshell case - available in a choice of black or red - reveals a 2in, 240 x 320, 262,144-colour display. Turn it round, and there's a two-megapixel camera with 8x digital zoom on the back feeding through to the main screen.

Available in black too

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Closed, the U9 measures 9 x 4.9 x 1.6cm and weighs 87.5g - a typical palm-sized music player. It has 25MB of user-accessible memory on board for songs, though you can add Micro SDHC cards of up to 4GB for more.

Playing a track causes touch-sensitive playback control keys to appear on the 128 x 168, 65,536-colour OLED screen, along with track times and details. The U9 plays MP3, AAC, WMA and WMA DRM files, either through its speaker, earphones or to wireless stereo speakers via a Bluetooth A2DP link.

Motorola said it expects the U9 to go on sale in Asia, Latin America and Europe during Q4.