MOBILE WAR: LG beats Apple to touch-screen mobile!!!

[Kiran.dks]

LG beats Apple to touch-screen mobile
LG releases own model months before the iPhone

LG Electronics has introduced a smartphone without buttons months before Apple's iPhone is due to hit the market.

The LG Prada was developed with fashion house Prada to be a slim and elegant fashion phone. It has a single touch-screen, 2-megapixel camera and is just 12mm thick.

First Pictures of the LG Prada Phone






"LG and Prada have worked together seamlessly towards a shared vision to develop one of the most beautifully stylish handsets the market has ever seen," said Dr Scott Ahn, president of LG Electronics.


In developing the phone LG contributed the internal electronics and hardware, while Prada developed the touch screen interface, exterior styling and a host of accessories for the fashion conscious.

"As we do with ready-to-wear and accessories, we were looking at a breakthrough," said Patrizio Bertelli, president of Prada.

"Consistent with our approach, we are not branding an existing product; rather we have been working with LG to give this new phone a very strong character and unique style, both in its content and in its design."

The phone is icon-based for control but the screen shuts down to conserve power when not in use and presents a uniformly black exterior. The handset will be available next month at a cost of €600.

Courtesy: vnunet
Image Source: gizmodo

[kumarmohit]

Looks like an iPhone ripoff any when is this expected in India?

[gxsaurav]

Actully, LG KE850 was given to the IF design foundation last month, before iPhone was announced, so obviously they have been working on it from quite some time. Touchscreen phones are available from a long time, it was obvious someone would come with a phone without keypad sometime anyway

It could be that LG is the OEM for Apple iPhone. The UI of KE850 is based on flash so it's not hard to make a program for it, provided that Adobe Flex is now available too.

The Prada model will be prices at 600 euro. Normal model will be priced lower

[tarey_g]

Originally Posted by kumarmohit

Looks like an iPhone ripoff any when is this expected in India?

iphone ripoff just within a week of unveiling of the phone at macworld , dumb thought. Products are not created in a week, its long term planning. Its not like LG saw the iphone in macworld and quickly made a cpoy. And they are releasing it before the iphone means that they were working on it from a long time and so was apple, and i am sure there are many other companies which have such undergoing projects . And the iphone concept is not entirely revolutionary , I saw the keynote speech of Mr Jobs and he was using too much adjectives to describe the phone as it is the most revolutionary product of the decade , its a very good product and i want one but these type of products are already in use and very popular in Japan. May be iphone is superior to all the existing of the similar type, but its not entirely new concept. The looks of a all touchscreen phone totally depend on the GUI and apple makes one of the best.

[Kiran.dks]

LG Prada looks good, but I find "dial a phone" written allover its body-making it messy...

[tarey_g]

Originally Posted by Kiran_tech_mania

LG Prada looks good, but I find "dial a phone" written allover its body-making it messy...

"dial a phone" is not written allover its body , its just the watermark on the image you posted .

[Pathik]

^^ lol yeah... tarey is rite...

[soham]

LG Prada is just sh*t. iPhone is far better looking and more featured and cheaper too.

[Kiran.dks]

Oh man! I really messed up by ignoring to observe the image! Thanks for pointing it out tarey.

[spynic]

iphone is ne day better than prada

[Stick]

Originally Posted by Kiran_tech_mania

Oh man! I really messed up by ignoring to observe the image! Thanks for pointing it out tarey.

Now Bulb Enlighten, Enlightening means Kiran and Kiran means you

[gxsaurav]

it's better to wait before u come to any conclusion. iPhone is very thing, we have no idea how durable it is, while LG KE850 looks far sturdier

[mail2and]

Unless one actually handles a phone, I fail to understand how one can deduce whether a handset is durable or not.

LG has had well designed phones from a long time now. However, the UI of LG phones is horrible. It's even clumsier than Motorola's UI. It'll be interesting to see whether LG can improve upon the UI of their phones, as currently, that's the weakest part of their phones.

Actually, Nokia's new Symbian phones can be described as the closest thing to iPhone, at least in the web browser department. The newer Symbian OS includes a browser based on Webkit, the base of Apple's Safari Browser. For more info, please read this: http://www.s60.com/business/producti...gies/webrowser

and this: http://trac.webkit.org/projects/webkit/wiki/S60Webkit

Features like AJAX, favicons, auto complete and RSS support excite me. We'll have to wait till June to know about the full feature set of iPhone's Safari.

I think for the iPhone to be successful, Apple needs to enable 3rd-party application support. Unless they do that, I'm not going to buy the iPhone. But, I hope by the time the 2nd-3rd gen iPhone comes out, Apple will enable third party developers to develop apps for the iPhone. At the moment, that is the biggest drawback.

[aryayush]

Originally Posted by gx_saurav

it's better to wait before u come to any conclusion. iPhone is very thing, we have no idea how durable it is, while LG KE850 looks far sturdier

OK, so thicker products are more durable than those that are comparatively thinner. So, floppies are more durable than CDs/DVDs - and headphones are more durable than earphones!

BTW, the Apple iPhone is 11.6 mm thin and the LG Prada, at 12 mm thin, is no heavy-weight either. So, according to you, a phone that is 12 mm thin should be more durable than one that is only 11.6 mm thin?
Well, I have an advice for future buyers of the iPhone. After you have bought the device, take it out of the box and stick a one-inch thick slab of wood onto its rear portion (leave space for the camera though). And lo, you have the most durable mobile phone ever!

[koolbluez]

But.. Frankly... Kahan Apple aur kahan LG.
Apple'll beat LG head-to-toe in both style & quality. They'll better be late & great than early & ...

[Stick]

An Apple a Year keeps LG Away. It becomes GpL for LG.

[Kiran.dks]

Originally Posted by Stick

An Apple a Year keeps LG Away. It becomes GpL for LG.

lol!

[tarey_g]

http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/11/i...rated-at-birth

Two sparsely-buttoned large, touchscreen phones: the Apple iPhone, and the LG KE850 (which already won the International Forum Design Product Design Award for 2007). Separated at birth, or possible lawsuit number two for Apple? You decide. - Engaget

[..:: Free Radical ::..]

I read this somewhere, lg rushed this announcement so that steve jobs could not patent MultiTouch technology of the iphone.
as to which is better, let them come to the markets people.

We shouldn't underestimate LG just because its LG. Who knows, it might even beat Apple's iPhone.

[aryayush]

Originally Posted by ..:: Free Radical ::..

I read this somewhere, lg rushed this announcement so that steve jobs could not patent MultiTouch technology of the iphone.
as to which is better, let them come to the markets people.

Just because it has a similar design does not mean it features Multi-touch. It does not recognise two fingers or gestures. There is no chance this phone can stop Apple from patenting the Multi-touch technology.