Outdoor specialist Quechua is all about capturing your sense of adventure with its camping, mountaineering and skiing gear and has now outed a smartphone to guard against the perils of those endeavours.

The Quechua Phone, made in association with Archos, pledges to guard against rain, snow, sand, mud, cold, snow and the occasional drop.

It's a 5-inch handset, packing Android 4.1 and a 1.2GHz quad-core Qualcomm processor and 4GB of internal storage with a MicroSD slot. It's also got a 5-megapixel camera for snapping shots of the great outdoors and its inhabitants.

Alongside its IP54 certification, it also packs a whopping 3,500mAh battery unit, which it promises will survive 22 hours of call time, which is sure to appeal to those spending the night in the wilderness.

Lost in translation?

Our French isn't what it was at secondary school, but judging by the source article, there'll be no 4G, but it does come as as accessible price for a second smartphone.

It'll be 230 Euros when it lands on December 5. That's about £190, $312 and AU$343. No word on international availability just yet, but we'll keep you posted.

Facebook has lost its mobile messaging lead to the upstart WhatsApp platform, according to new research published this weekend..

OnDevice surveyed almost 4,000 smartphone users in five countries and found that a whopping 44 per cent of them were using WhatsApp to stay in touch with friends.

35 per cent of those folks - in US, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia and China - were using Facebook Messenger in November.

Despite eliminating BlackBerry users, the reborn BBM platform was down in 5th place with a respectable 15 per cent of those surveyed using the service, behind WeChat (28 per cent) and Twitter (16 per cent).

The rise of BBM?

BlackBerry's platform does seem to be doing exceedingly well in South Africa, according to the study, will 34 per cent of surveyed users frequenting the app in November.

Another takeaway from the research was the popularity of social messaging apps compared with traditional SMS messaging.

OnDevice found the 85 per cent of its sample used the likes of WhatsApp and Facebook last month, while 75 per cent used text messages.

As is often the case with these surveys, it's by no means conclusive. There was no mention of the $3 billion-valued Snapchat, while the influential European mobile market was ignored entirely.