Happy New Year all, and welcome to 2009! This week sees the start of the consumer electronics tradeshow season, with CES 2009 running from 8 – 11th of January. I’ll provide an overview of what to expect from CES 2009 from the major mobile phone manufacturers tomorrow, but before then, I thought I’d mention a new trend that has just appeared on the radar regarding mobile phone form factors – the watch phone.

Watch phones aren’t new – there have been dozens of attempts that have been tried before, but they’re all, without exception, completely useless! The main problem, of course, has always been the tiny size, which has not only limited the features of the phone, but also made the screen so small as to be unusable.

Until now, the only watch phone that’s had any kind of success has been the Bluetooth Watch from the likes of Sony Ericsson and LG, which isn’t a phone per se, but which, through Bluetooth technology, can communicate with your phone so you can see who’s calling and read texts that have been received.

For 2009, though, LG will be releasing the LG-GD910, a fully-featured watch phone that it’ll be showing off at CES 2009 later this week. How fully-featured you ask? Well, it offers a 1.4″ touchscreen display, so no messing with keys measured in the nanometer scale, a camera, MP3 player, speakerphone, text-to-speech function, and, bizarrely, 7.2Mbps HSDPA!

I’m not entirely sure why you’d need such a fast data connection, as apart from images, it’s not like you’ll be doing a lot video downloads with this thing! It does support video calls, but they hardly require huge bandwidth as the quality is so poor.

Still, as far as the geek factor is concerned, having a watch with a faster data connection than many home broadband connections will certainly push you up to geek factor 11 in the eyes of your friends. Not sure if that’s where you want to be seen, but it’ll certainly do it!

Joking aside, the LG GD-910 actually looks quite good, albeit in quite a geeky sort of way, and with LG behind it, it seems the watch phone might finally be about to become mainstream. Other companies who’ve tried this form factor in the past have been small companies who no-one’s heard of, but with LG’s branding and distribution, the GD-910 should certainly sell more units than other watch phone in the past.

We’ll just have to see whether it catches on or not.

We’ll give you more details on the LG GD-910 watch phone when it’s finally revealed at CES 2009 later this week.

[Source: PCWorld]