Curitel, the South Korean handset maker that made the news in late August when it announced a deal to ship a new camera phone to Verizon Wireless (NYSE:VZ) also grabbed some headlines last week, with the launch of the P1, a slick-looking camera phone with a twist: speech synthesis.  Yes, the phone has text-to-speech as a built-in feature.

Given that the speech engine being used is in shrink-wrap mode, it might not have a large vocabulary.  The speech synthesis is done to output via voice the contents of the text data such as alarms, scheduling and SMS.

The cam-phone, which comes in different color models, is held sideways.  P1 is also equipped with a 2-megapixel digital camera and a 1.9 inch wide TFT LCD screen. (hat tip: Telecoms Korea)