LG Prada II mobile phone with LG Prada Link Bluetooth watch
Since the credit crunch descended on the world like a tsunami of gloom, things in the mobile phone sector have been shaken up as much as they have in every other sector. Mobile phones obviously cover the entire sector of price points, from virtually disposable, to completely unaffordable.

With an impending global recession looming on the horizon, though, it’s the more expensive designer phones that will start to struggle first. Designer phones are all about luxury, offering looks but few frills for a designer price. When everyone’s cutting back on their spending, though, look are the first thing to go. If you can make do with a similar phone that looks a bit uglier but offers the same features as a designer phone, what are you going to choose when money’s tight?

This is the predicament that LG finds itself in, as it’s set to launch its latest designer phone, the LG Prada II. The original LG Prada phone was a designer phone that came with touchscreen interface before the Apple iPhone, and it sold by the bucketload.

LG had hoped to repeat this performance with the new LG Prada II, a designer phone that’s actually pretty well stuffed with features as well. However, with Prada’s name attached to the device, it’s also not exactly cheap, which is exactly the kind of phone that won’t exactly be selling in droves in the current cash-strapped climate.

So what are LG doing to encourage the masses to buy the new LG Prada II? Throwing in a fancy new LG Prada Bluetooth watch, that’s what.

The LG Prada II was already a highly-specced phone, coming with slide out QWERTY keyboard as well as touchscreen interface, plus Wi-Fi, HSDPA, and a 5 megapixel camera.

To sweeten the deal, though, they’ve created a fancy LG Prada watch as well. Called the LG Prada Link, the new watch shows you who’s calling, displays text messages, and vibrates to indicate that you’ve got an incoming call. Perfect for meetings, in fact, and quite stylish too.

Whether it’s enough to encourage people to actually buy an expensive designer phone we’ll have to wait and see, but it’s yet another sign of these depressing signs that the name Prada isn’t enough on its own any more to shift what happens to be a very good mobile in its own right.

[Source: NewLaunches]