Ice-Watch will expand with smartphone and tablet

Samsung smartphones “pimped in France

Jean-Pierre Lutgen, the Belgian founder and creator of Ice-Watch, has struck a license deal with French CG Mobile, which brings special editions of Samsung smartphones and tablets to market. Hello Kitty and Hugo Boss are two of the previous special editions and it wishes to add Ice-Phone to that list of achievements. CG Mobile also sells accessories for phones and tablets for brands like Ferrari, Guess, Karl Lagerfeld and Vespa, to name a few.

You will be able to buy a budget smartphone for 100 euro, called Ice-Mini, in six different colours, while the larger version will cost 150 euro and is called Ice-Forever. The tablet will be called Ice-Tab, costs 200 euro and is available in 4 colours. The range of products will only be produced in limited numbers for the first run, with 50,000 in total on offer in France and Belgium. The Belgian partner of the Ice-Phone launch will be Base and sales will start on 1 March.

Another brand lawsuit incoming?

“We have licensed the name and keep track of the design and the packaging, but the production and the distribution are entirely up to our French partner”, Jean-Pierre Lutgen told business newspaper De Tijd. The trendy brand with more than 5 million Facebook likes has put up one condition for the collaboration: Ice-Phone had to contain “the same DNA as the Ice-Watch, namely affordable, colourful, fashionable and with a touch of silicone.”

It is somewhat surprising that the name Ice-Phone was chosen, as Ice-Watch has just ended a dispute surrounding its name with Swatch. That Swiss watch brand believed the name resembled its own brand a little too much, but the dispute got settled less than a month ago. It remains to be seen whether Apple will accept the resemblance, but it is quite possible history will repeat itself for Ice-Watch…