Is the World Ready for a Pepsi Phone?

File this away in the “unlikely rumor of the weekend” category, but the smartphone world is on standby after an official Pepsi Phone account was spotted on Weibo (essentially the Chinese version of Twitter). As yet there’s nothing official to report, but the speculation has already started about what the soft drinks giant might have in store.

Pepsi doesn’t have its own smartphone-building production line of course, but there are plenty of Asian manufacturers who would be happy to make a handset on behalf of PepsiCo — or at least the Chinese arm of PepsiCo. The Pepsi Phone account was linked to by the official Pepsi China Weibo account, so it looks like something’s afoot.

Quite what the value of a Pepsi-branded phone would be is difficult to say, but the Chinese and Japanese markets are more open than the U.S. to the quirky and the unusual. Perhaps it’s all an elaborate publicity stunt — it doesn’t seem likely that Pepsi would want to take on the might of the Apple iPhone or the Samsung Galaxy range in the long term.

Back in the States, Pepsi has created a special Pepsi Perfect edition of its beverage to tie in with an upcoming Back to the Future milestone: Oct. 21, 2015, is the date Marty McFly travels to in the second film in the series. Only 6,500 of the bottles are going to go on sale in the U.S. and they’ll cost $20.15 each.

Putting together an entire phone is a much more ambitious endeavor: Will Coca-Cola follow suit? With questions being asked about the health issues associated with soda drinks, perhaps this is one way the major players are going to be able to diversify into other markets. As and when Pepsi has anything official to say, we’ll let you know — but don’t start saving up for a Pepsi Phone just yet.

Is the world ready for a Pepsi Phone?

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