Vectronix, a Swiss company that makes military survey systems and night vision products, has a new cell phone in the offing (possibly made in partnership with Sagem), dubbed the Sagem vectroTEL X8, with a unique distinction from the other run-of-the-mill phones out there in the market today. This tri-band GSM 900/1800/1900MHz phone sports a QVGA hi-res 240x320 pixel resolution screen with 256k colors as well as a 1.3 mega-pixel camera.

Traditional GSM cell phones are prone to eavesdropping - which means your confidential conversations are, well, not so confidential anymore. To put an end to your security concerns, the vectroTEL X8 has a special crypto mode where calls made to another vectroTEL phone are encrypted and completely secure.

The phones use asymmetric key exchange method by Diffie-Hellman with 1024 bits, and 128-bit AES encryption scheme for a most secure environment when making your calls. What's more, keys are recalculated for each call and deleted immediately after the call is terminated, so that the keys cannot be reconstructed.

Making an encrypted phone call is simple enough: press the relevant soft-key on the phone to enter crypto mode and dial the number as usual. There will be a delay of about 30 seconds for the keys to be generated and exchanged with the recipient's phone - but that's a small price to pay for a secure channel. The crypto module is the same size as a miniSD card, making it discreet. The keypad design is not very becoming (I suspect they are too small for most people to use comfortably), but should be okay.

The phone's got Blue-tooth, Infrared and USB connectivity options as well. No pricing info yet, but more details are available from vectroTEL's dedicated website. Extended entry has a feature list.

(Via engadget)