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]

Better known as the LG Cookie, the KP500 is a brand new phone from LG, and I have to say, after playing with it for around 20 minutes or so, I'm extremely impressed. The KP500 is a touchscreen mobile phone with a really intuitive and rather smart new user interface, and has one of the clearest, sharpest screens I've seen.

It's not exactly under-specified either. Sure it doesn't have Wi-Fi or GPS, but it looks like it'll give the Samsung Tocco a run for its money as a decent touchscreen phone.

Read on after the jump for my complete hands-on LG KP500 review.

LG KP500 Overview

The LG KP500 is a mid-range phone, and so doesn't come laden down with a huge number of features. What you do get for your money, though, is a fantastic little phone that's super slim and super-light. Indeed, at just 89g, it's so light, I'm quite sure you could easily forget it's in your pocket!

The KP500 that I received comes in black with a huge touchscreen dominating the front together with three buttons. The touchscreen is haptic, so the phone vibrates whenever you touch something interesting (insert your own punchline here!), and can be used either with stylus or with your finger.

You can enter text either through the stylus, by pointing and clicking at various characters (i.e. a mobile phone-like keypad or a full virtual QWERTY keyboard), or by writing, as the KP500 also supports hand writing recognition.

It's extremely minimalist on the outside, with just a few dedicated buttons, with most of the actions being performed via the touchscreen.

LG KP500 User Interface

Time was when the user interface was the last thing you worried about with a mobile phone, but since the iPhone, all that has changed. Every phone and his dog now has a touchscreen with a fancy new user interface, and the LG KP500 is no exception.

This time, though, the user interface is rather smart. It's not overly elaborate. There are no massively animated icons or amazing transition effects from one screen to another, but you do get a satisfying little visual jolt when a menu is pulled down, and all of the menus are a really good size, really responsive, and actually look rather good.

The LG KP500 is clearly aimed at the Samsung Tocco, and for my money, the KP500 has the much better user interface. It's more responsive, visually more pleasing and more intuitive.

LG KP500 Camera

The KP500 comes with a 3 megapixel camera, and the pictures it takes are shown off to great effect with its large and extremely clear screen. Interestingly, although the screen is 3" in size, it only supports 256,000 colours, yet it's so bright, it looks like it's displaying many more.

Anyway, back to the camera. It is, as you'd expect, located on the back of the device, with the camera key in the usual place on the top. You get the obligatory shutter delay that you find on many camera phones, but it's nowhere near as slow as on many other phones.

The camera comes with a limited range of features for taking better pictures. You can adjust the exposure, white balance, and choose day or night settings, but that's about your lot. As such, although it takes good pics in good conditions, don't expect it to perform well in low light conditions or where there's fast motion.

There are a few neat ways of viewing your pics once you've taken them. There's a slide show feature, which literally slides your pics from the right to the left, or you can use the stylus and slide the manually. There's also the traditional gallery, where you can browse through thumbnails to find the pic you want.

The video camera offers the same array of features as well, but is a bit more limited - just 12 frames per second at a QVGA resolution. This is fairly poor, and I can't imagine many people recording anything of note on the LG Cookie!

Music features

The music features of the LG KP500 are much better. You get the obligatory MP3 player with a variety of different adjustable equalizer settings, and although the phone only comes with 48MB of onboard memory, there's a microSD card slot that will support up to 8GB.

There's even an FM radio built-in, if you're bored with your tunes.

Connectivity

The connectivity on the LG KP500 aren't exactly great. Forget Wi-Fi, HSDPA - indeed, you can even forget 3G. Although the KP500 has a Web browser, it only supports quad-band GSM, GPRS and EDGE, meaning you'll be lucky to get dial-up speeds when using the Internet. This is a shame, as the screen is a good size for Web browsing, but it's one of the downsides of building a phone down to a price, rather than up to a high spec.

You do, however, get USB 2.0 and Bluetooth A2DP,so you can stream your tunes to a suitably-equipped Bluetooth speaker, for example.

Other features

In addition to the features listed above, the LG KP500 makes good use of its accelerometer. As well as automatically adjusting pictures to either landscape or horizontal mode just by turning the phone over, it also lets you adjust the icons you've placed on the home screen's desktop.

If you've dragged a lot icons on to the desktop so that they're scattered all over the place, simple shake the phone and they're automagically arranged neatly for you. Not exactly a must-have feature, but a nice touch nonetheless.

There are also quite a few nice applications to play around with, including your usual ToDo lists, calendars, and even a Word and Excel viewer. In addition, there are some nice apps you can use for editing your pictures and videos directly within the phone, including the ability to write or draw all over your picture.

Again, not a must-have feature, but it all adds value to the overall package.

Summary

At this stage, you might be thinking the LG KP500 is a bit underwhelming. It has a good display, a very usable touch screen and a nice user interface, but everything else seems a bit limited.

The reason for this is that LG decided to pitch the LG KP500 at the bottom end of the market, and this, naturally, is reflected in its price. The LG KP500 will set you back just £97, and that's Pay As You Go, without any contract whatsoever. For a phone as good looking as this, with a genuinely good touchscreen and a great little user interface, that's fantastic value.

As such, feature for feature, it can't compete with the Samsung Tocco, but given that the Tocco is £200 more, it doesn't have to. The two phones are pitched at entirely different markets.

The Samsung Tocco is a good-priced feature phone that sits at the middle of the market. In contrast, the LG KP500 is a great-priced touchscreen phone that sits at the low end of the phone, with features to match.

That said, the KP500, despite its lower price, has a much better user interface, is more responsive, and just feels more fun and easier to use all round than the Tocco. For less than £100, this is fantastic value, so if you're looking for a neat phone at a bargain price, I can strongly recommend the LG KP500 Cookie.

I'll give it 9/10 - strongly recommended!

Well well, what have we here? It's the rather cute looking LG KP500 in my sweaty little hands, being all unboxed! It's a great little phone, I have to say. I'll have a full hands-on review of it for you early next week, but I thought you might like to see a little unboxing of it first as a taster.

No idea why, but people seem to like unboxing videos!

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]

They weren't of course, and although the Prada sold over a million units, it never matched the success of the iPhone.

The LG Prada II, in contrast, is being released into a world that's nopw grown accustomed to touchscreen phones, and so won't have the direct iPhone comparisons to struggle against. This has give LG the freedom to be a bit more experimental with its design.

As you can see from the pics, the LG Prada II comes with a slide out QWERTY keyboard, making it more of a smartphone than the original Prada (which was just a smart phone!). It also implicitly says that LG couldn't get text entry to work properly on its touchscreen phones, and so needed to revert back to a physical keyboard!

In other respects, the new Prada is similar in use to the original version, but it's had its feature-set brought right up to date:

• 3G video calling
• 7.2Mbsp HSDPA
• Full HTM browser
• Wi-Fi
• 5 mega pixel camera with Schneider-Kreuznach lens

In fact, other than GPS, it's so fully-loaded with features, it even gives tpo-end smartphones a run for their money.

The LG Prada II looks like a great successor to the original Prada phone, combining style, ease of use and fantastic features. I've no doubt it'll sell another million phones for LG.

The new LG Prada II release date is the fourth quarter of 2008 (so, now then!), priced 600 Euros.

You can think of the LG Renoir as LG's answer to the Nokia N95. Actually, it's more than that - in many ways, it's the successor to the N95 and what the N96 should have been.

Take, for example, the Renoir's tour de force - its camera. At 8 megapixels, it beats the N95 and N96's 5 megapixels in terms of resolution, and then throws a few little extras opn top just for good measure. There's a Schneider-Kreuznach lens for top quality focusing, a Xenon flash (xenon is by far the best type of flash technology for camera phones), digital image stabilizer and even Face Detection, which ensures your subject's face will always be in focus no matter how crap at shooting images you are!

Of course, the LG Renoir couldn't claim to trump the N95 or N96 unless it had a few other tricks up its sleeve, and so LG have thrown WiFi, HSDPA (which can run at 7.2 Mbps) and GPS into the mix as well. They've also added a touchscreen, just to ensure the Renoir is untouchable (geddit?! Sorry...!)

Add to that video playback that supports DivX and XVid encoding, and video recording that can record video at 120fps (creating a slow motion effect when played back), and you've got a multimedia monster that's quite possibly the most high-specced phone on the market today.

Well, maybe not today - but come October 15th, when it's officially on sale, it certainly will be!

I'll have a review of the LG KC910 Renoir soon, but if you can't wait, head on over to Dialaphone or Phones4U and pre-order now!

Seriously, LG, if you're going to market a phone based on its price, you should at least give some idea of what it is!

Given the dearth of features of the KP500, I'm guessing it'll be in the £100 - £150 range. The KP500 is a quad-band phone with touchscreen and accelerometer, but other than that, it seems to have no other feature. Net even a camera is mentioned.

So it seems that the ubiquitous touchscreen has now become a feature in its own right, and that LG are banking on people paying for a phone with nothing but a touchscreen. Which seems a bit like car manufacturers hoping people will buy their car because it comes with a steering wheel!

The phone looks stylish enough, but it'll have to be dirt cheap to do well, at least if it really has as few features as the press release implies.

LG KP500 in detail

Speaking of which, here is the press release:

LG Electronics, a worldwide technology and design leader in mobile communications, announces the launch of LG KP500 with an affordable introduction price never offered before. This attractively-priced full touch screen handset is complete with the latest touch technology and features found in the existing high-end full touch screen handsets currently available on the market.

“The feedback we receive from consumers around the world indicate that there’s more people who wish to try the latest touch screen phones,” said Dr. Skott Ahn, President and CEO of LG Electronics Mobile Communications Company. “We want to reach out to this group and LG KP500 is our answer to deliver a high quality full touch screen phone that is easy to use and much easier to afford. Within reach of many consumers, we hope that more people will experience the joy of using the latest touch screen technology with LG KP500.”

Since the first full touch screen phone, the PRADA Phone by LG arrived on the market, LG has been advancing touch screen technology in new models of phones that suit different consumer needs such as the LG Viewty, the top-selling 5 mega-pixel camera phone with full touch screen providing a complete new viewing enjoyment.

With continuous advances in touch screen technology, the LG KP500 has LG's latest precision refinements for when the human touch meets the vivid digital screen.

From LG's experience in producing stylish and sophisticated handsets, the LG KP500 also receives the same attention to the finer details. Slim-profiled and lightweight, the LG KP500 comes in black, Vandyke brown, Anodizing silver, and Elegant gold, giving consumers more choices for their personal tastes.

As a slim and stylish handset, the LG KP500 is a GSM phone which can operate in four frequency bands, giving it a far-reaching reception range, and upon its global release, the LG KP500 can be used in 39 languages. But no matter what language one speaks, the vivid and intuitive user interface of the LG KP500 is simple for anyone to understand with vivid icons on the wide 3 inch screen.

Keeping in touch with friends has never been easier as the LG KP500 has the latest UI that allows the user to attach a friend's photo for the speed dial feature and then page through the portraits and touch the friend to be called. "We optimized the user interface to keep the tactile operations smooth and simple which is necessary when you’re opening up a new technology to a wide group of people," said Skott Ahn. With such ease of use, LG expects to broaden the base of touch screen handset consumers around the world.

The LG KP500 has an embedded stylus pen concealed in the base that can be easily removed for the advanced handwriting recognition program that allows the user to write memos and text messages, and also edit photo images by touching the screen with the pen tip. The QWERTY onscreen keyboard slides into view when the LG-KP500 is held horizontally, and the auto rotating display always shifts images or documents for proper viewing no matter which way the handset is turned.

Also packed into the LG KP500 are motion sensor games that are played by turning, flipping, and shifting the handset for a more active and fun gaming experience.

The LG KP500 will be available at the end of October 2008 in Europe and then on to the rest of the world. The price of the LG KP500 will be announced during the launch.

As these leaked pics show, it's not exactly bad looking, either, although it does seem to take its styling cues from another rater more famous touchscreen smartphone that's been on the market for a while now.


Indeed, it's pretty obvious that the LG Renoir is LG's attempt to trounce the iPhone, and in terms of features, there's absolutely no contest.

The Renoir could pretty much beat any other phone around in a game of Top Trumps, let alone the iPhone's relatively weak feature list.

However, the proof, as they say, is in the accessibility, flexibility, intuitiveness, speed and all round user experience afforded by the device's user interface (not the pudding - this is a mobile phone, remember, not a cake!)

The iPhone's unique selling point is its incredible UI, and Apple have rightly realized that all the features in the world don't mean a damn if the don't actually work all that well, or they're not actually that usable due to a poor UI.

So we can judge the Renoir now as a definite success based on its feature set alone. But as a viable alternative to the iPhone?

We'll just have to wait and see the real thing in action.

Certainly these leaked pics don't exactly make me gasp with amazement, as the UI looks very plain indeed, but pictures alone can't give the full story, so I'll reserve judgment until the Renoir is released.

[Source: BoyGenius]

More details of the LG-KC910 after the jump.

LG-KC910 overview

As you can see, the LG-KC910 (or LG Viewty II, as somepeople are calling it) is a touchscreen candybar phone featuring a user interface not dissimilar to that of the latest smartphones. Having a big analogue clock in the middle of a touchscreen seems de rigeur, these days, and the LG-KC910 is no different. Keeping up with the Samsungs, you could say!

More impressive, though, is the list of features. Just check this lot out:

• 8 megapixel camera with Schneider-Kreuznach certified optics
• Auto-focus and manual focus
• Xenon Flash
• Adjustable ISO sensitivity up to 1600
• Image Stabilization
• Face tracking
• Smile detection
• Blink detection (yes, seriously!)
• aGPS
• Dolby Mobile
• DivX and Xvid movie playback
• 3" WQVGA touschcreen
• Wi-Fi
• 7.2Mbps HSDPA
• Video recording up to 120fps for slow-mo playback

Phew! That's one seriously long list of features. In fact, other than the ability to play the trumpet, I don't think there's anything they've actually missed out.

The LG-KC910 is, quite clearly, LG's new flagship handset, and looks set to take on the Samsung Omnia and Nokia N96 head to head. Whether it'll succeed or not will be dependent largely on how well these features are implemented, as LG are renowned for making phones with a superb feature-set, but with a poor user interface, making the features almost impossible to use.

We'll only know once we get our grubby hands on one, but fortunately we won't have to wait too long - the LG-KC910 Viewty II release date is set for October 2008, so just over a month until we find out.

You even get aGPS thrown in for location-based services. But none of these features is particularly inspiring. This in itself wouldn't be a problem, as designer phones tend not to come with high spec features, but given that it doesn't exactly look all that great either, the LG Chocolate 3 is in danger of becoming just another mid-range mobile phone. In other words, a bit anonymous.

More details and pictures of the LG Chocolate 3 after the jump.

This is a shame, as the Chocolate was one of the phones that enabled LG to differentiate itself from its competitors. Indeed, such was its success as a designer phone that it usurped the Motorola RAZR as the most successful designer phone on the market, and provided the foundations for LG to continue its success with its LG Shine range. But now, it seems, the LG Chocolate 3 is just a good-if-average mid-range phone. From Belgian Truffle to bog standard milk chocolate in three generations, you could say!

Maybe that's why LG chose to release the LG Chocolate 3 on the same day that the new Apple iPhone 3G was launched!

[Source: LaptopMag]