A Polestar Phone now inexplicably exists

• The Polestar Phone. Someday it will unlock your Polestar car. [credit: Polestar ]

Polestar, the Volvo offshoot EV company, has made a smartphone. It's called, predictably, the Polestar Phone, and it's only available in China. There have been a lot of car-brand smartphones out there (it's often Lamborghini), but usually, these are licensing deals that the car company ignores. Polestar seems to be proud of this phone, though, making it a bit more involved than the usual car-brand licensing deal. Just look at the new navigation drawer on the polestar.cn site, which has four main items: "Polestar 2", "Polestar 3", "Polestar 4" and now "Polestar Phone."

Why would a niche EV brand make a phone? Maybe all that work on the Android Automotive OS made Polestar's engineers really enthusiastic about Android device development. The website, through machine translation, promises the phone was "jointly designed by the Polestar global design team and the Xingji Meizu team in Gothenburg, Sweden, and is decorated with Swedish gold details that symbolize high performance." "Decorated" is probably the best way you could describe Polestar's contributions to this phone since it seems to be a bog standard Meizu 21 Pro with some Polestar branding. It does look beautiful, with a no-nonsense minimal rectangular design and all-screen front, but the same can be said for the Meizu phone this is based on.

So, how exactly is the Polestar Phone related to a Polestar car? Well, both run Android and have all-electric power systems. The phone has a slightly smaller battery than the EV, at only 5,050 mAh (that's something like 18 Wh) compared to the 100 kWh battery of something like a Polestar 4. The car also has the phone beat on-screen size, with the phone packing a pocketable 120 Hz 6.79-inch, 3192×1368 OLED, and the Polestars all sporting big tablet screens.