LG India launches GD900 Crystal phone with transparent touchpad

Posted on 18-11-2009

Back in February, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, LG wowed the world with an astonishing style statement in mobile phones: a prototype handset with a transparent keypad! Dubbed the ‘Crystal’, it turned heads and was the talk of the town.

Well, the phone has finally been launched in India, and the GD900 Crystal packs a lot of oomph in its 13.5-mm-thin frame. As you can see in the picture, the transparent touch-sensitive keypad is absolutely gorgeous and utterly unique, making this phone the default standard for anyone looking to make a fashion statement. Illuminated with a soft glow, it boasts of a scratch-resistant design made from tempered glass and reinforced by a band of liquid metal.

While it looks like a normal keypad, its touch-sensitive nature actually lets it double up as a touchpad for the phone, behaving like a laptop’s trackpad, recognising handwriting, responding to multi-touch commands and enabling a new way of navigation called Gesture Command.

With Gesture Command, a user can simply press the phone’s multitasking button and draw one of 12 customisable symbols on the keypad. For example, if the symbol resembling a capital M is assigned to the MP3 player or a capital C is assigned to camera, launching any of these features is as easy as writing M or C on the Crystal Touchpad.

Speaking of the camera, the 8-megapixel shutter on this gizmo comes with autofocus and LED flash, and can also record video at 720x480 pixels resolution. The accelerometer on the 3-inch capacitive touchscreen (16 million colours, 480x800 pixels) helps auto-rotate the screen when taking pictures, and even comes with a proximity sensor to turn it off when talking on the phone. The proprietary S-Class user interface only adds to the charm of the GD900 Crystal.

And there’s ample room to store all of your songs on the 1.5GB of internal memory, with a microSD memory card slot to boost it up to 32GB. Obviously, there is no lack of connectivity options here, with the phone supporting 3G, Wi-Fi, EDGE, Bluetooth, etc.

Boasting of a talk-time of up to 6 hours and a standby time of up to 300 hours, it’s a bit surprising that such a high-end phone with a focus on fashion and design is retailing at a comparatively low price of Rs. 26,000.

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