It seems to be the thing these days for the truly geeky and truly wealthy: your every day gadgets, blinged up. We've covered a few of them here on the gadgets weblog; now BusinessWeek.com has an article talking about a whole host of diamond- and gold-encrusted gadgets that various companies from Bang and Olufsen (the Serene - pictured - the world's most expensive cell phone at $1,275) to Tulip (the Ego Diamond, a laptop running at $355,000).

It's certainly an interesting phenomenon - who needs to buy three extra houses or five swimming pools when you can carry your conspicuous consumption with you - but it also strikes me as pretty silly; why exactly do you need $1275 cell phone? Unless you're rocking one of these, that is.