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There will be a European version of the XP3 with fewer features, as well.

"There's two percent of the market that will really want these phones, and they'll find us," Plaschke said.

There are other rugged phones on the US market, but none are this tough. The toughest I've encountered are the Nextel i365 and i580, but they aren't waterproof, just water-resistant. The Verizon G'zOne line is waterproof, but not quite as rugged. The Kyocera KX12, for Alltel, and the new Samsung Rugby, for AT&T, are also rugged, but not as hardened as the Sonim beasts. Of course, many of those phones also have consumer-friendly media features that the XP3 lacks.

Sonim may be a US firm, but so far they've stayed out of the US market, except for the occasional gray-market import of their existing XP1 phone. The reason is familiar: the U.S. market is "a monopoly ... okay, an oligopoly," Plaschke said, where if you're a GSM phone maker, two people (the buyers for AT&T and T-Mobile) control almost all the GSM phone sales in the country.

In other countries, people can buy GSM phones independent of service, leading to a richer and more diverse retail culture, Plaschke said.

That's changed, though, as Sonim has made a deal with ten carriers in a consortium of rural GSM carriers, covering about 10 million people. These guys, it turns out, are a perfect fit for the XP3, as they cover a lot of rugged terrain.

"This is the first-ever exclusive for the rural GSM association," Plaschke said. He said they expect to sell about 50,000 phones in the US in their first year here. That's not a lot in terms of the larger cell phone market, but Sonim's a small company; it's enough for them.

And Sonim's concerns aren't what you'd call consumer mainstream. They're rough-and-tumble. The XP3 has an accelerometer, just like the iPhone's, for instance. But it won't be used for games; it'll be used to detect if the user (say, a lineman somewhere outside of Wichita) has suffered a fall and can't get up.

Similarly, the GPS isn't just for driving directions; it'll also potentially be used as part of a "safety beacon" service that can help folks lost in the wilderness.

With Sonim's older XP1 becoming the XP3, I had to ask, where's the XP2? That number is being saved for an upcoming consumer model, Plaschke said.

"Our two biggest sets of requests have been from soldiers, and from parents of teenagers," Plaschke said. The XP3 definitely strikes me as the kind of phone you'd take to Iraq, but it doesn't have much for the more average phone-destroying consumer. We'll hear more about a model for regular folks in 2009, Plaschke said. A combination satellite/terrestrial model is also in the works, he said

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