French Designer Philippe Starck claims that he has been working on a revolutionary new product with Apple and it will be unveiled in around eight months time. The comments were made to French newspaper Le Figaro and France-Info radio.

"Indeed, there is a big project together which will be out in eight months," said the designer in the show "Everything and its opposite." Invoking the "religious cult of secrecy" of the California firm, he declined further detail, except to talk about a project "quite revolutionary. (French translation)

Either way, we expect some terse phone calls from Cupertino to be hitting Starck's line any time now...

Update: According to Sebastian Page of iDownloadblog, it's an Apple Store design.

>According to a trustworthy source in France, Philippe Starck is actually working on a design for a future Apple Store. I wasn’t able to get more details out of my contact, but I do trust her. And from what I hear, this is hardly a secret in the small French world of design and architecture.

Hit the source link below for more.

Update 2: Apple has issued a statement that they aren't working with Starck on anything at all. He might still be making a yacht that Steve Jobs had commissioned prior to his death.

Source: Hardmac via 9to5 Mac, ATD ; Image: Wikipedia, iDownloadblog

Throwing any last remnants of fragile self-consciousness to the four winds, I break out my subpar French and very rusty Italian and Mandarin Chinese (Aiya!) and see if, even under the onslaught of terrible accents, Apple's new iPhone 3G S Voice Control can still do as it's told.

Note: the accent appears to be key. If you say a command in French, you can't pronounce the following name English-style and expect good results (though Chinese seemed much more English name tolerant). However, I tried some (poorly rendered) regional accents at the very end and that didn't seem to be a problem.

If you're multilingual, or have a colorful twang to your speech, give it a try and let us know how Voice Control works for you!