There seem to be three ways to captivate the interest of cell phone connoisseurs, or at the very least, get them to give the handset a second glance. You could pack in some crazy features that blow the competition away, make an intriguing or different form factor, or just take an existing package and slap on some colourful faceplates.

Samsung has taken the last of these options with the SGH-E870 fashionphone, a tri-band GSM/EDGE handset that will come in five new shades very soon. I say shades, because with the exception of “platinum red”, the new colors are fairly subdued and are rather slightly tinted versions of the standard silver clamshell. I suppose this is good for those of us who want to “express ourselves” and be a little different without standing out like a sore thumb with a bright magenta handset.

The feature set for these alternate E870s stays the same, with a 1.3 megapixel shooter, 80MB of internal memory, Bluetooth, an MP3 player, microSD expansion, and video playback capabilities. Too bad there’s no external control for your tunes.