Panasonic today took to the stage at Photokina 2014 and surprised many by introducing a new smartphone, the Lumix CM1.

Be careful not to confuse your Lumix with your Lumia here, as Panasonic has put a 1-inch sensor into this phone. That's the sort of size you find in an enthusiast compact and likely to attract a lot of attention.

It's a 20-megapixel 1-inch sensor with f/2.8 Leica glass packed onto the rear of a smartphone. There's a dedicated button for the camera function, making this appear much more like a slim compact camera, and not so much like a smartphone.

The remainder of the specs look pretty typical for an Android device - a 4.7-inch 1080p display and a 2.3GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor, 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage. Snapping a lot of pictures or shooting 4K video you'll be glad of the microSD card support.

Panasonic's previous smartphone efforts - the Eluga waterproof phone - left a lot to be desired. Exactly how this new CM1 model will play out remains to be seen, but it appears very much to be a camera first and a smartphone second.

We've been playing with a pre-production Lumix CM1 at Photokina in Cologne. For a detailed overview and our thoughts, follow the link below.

READ: Panasonic Lumix CM1. Is it a camera, is it a phone? It's a bit of both

Panasonic has confirmed that this particular Lumix is not slated to come to the UK, sadly - at least not upon day one launch. Germany will be the first EU country to receive the device in early 2015. Price, however, is yet to be determined.