LG’s “Secret” to beating the iPhone?

by Alex Zaharov-Reutt

Thursday, 26 June 2008

Page 2 of 3 There’s also the “Neon Touch Navigation buttons” which LG says “sensitively respond to commands with illustrious effects in lavish blue.” Working with the fact this phone has a touch screen, as is the latest fashion in phones, there’s a special “Touch Media” button on the right hand side of the phone which lets you “directly access five multimedia functions”. These include music, photos, games, documents, and FM radio. Thankfully, it’s a multitasking environment – you can “simultaneously flick through photos on the screen while listening to music”. The documents feature lets you view (but not edit) Word, Excel, PowerPoint, text and PDF files, and there’s a “Google Package” of software included so you can surf the Internet (i.e. it has a browser), log into your Gmail, use Google Maps and use phone towers to approximate your position on the map and watch YouTube videos – if you’re a customer of Three Mobile or Optus. There’s also some “motion games” inside the phone, and while they’re cute, they don’t look as though they’ll be on par with the games demo’d for the iPhone 3G at the recent WWDC. The games are described as having “a gyroscope-like effect enabled by the accelerometer sensor. With a tilt or rotation of the handset, the user can throw a dart, hook a fish, or navigate a maze.” While the phone is 3.6Mbps HSDPA compatible, it works on the 900/1800/1900/2100Mhz 3.5G networks, so we won’t see this phone on the Telstra 850MHz Next G network anytime soon. LG would have to release a special model with an 850MHz chip for that to happen first. Also Vodafone is not mentioned, but with a 2100 and 900MHz 3.5G HSDPA chip inside, they’d also be a prime candidate to take it up if they so desired. The screen auto-rotates like an iPhone when watching videos or looking at photos, there’s an “auto luminance control” to change the screen’s brightness automatically and you can synchronise the phone to your PC (and synchronise the phone’s personal organiser) with Bluetooth so you don’t have to fiddle with USB cables. The phone itself has 100MB of memory on board, but thankfully has a MicroSD HC compatible memory card slot. It’s compatible with up to 4GB cards. Not sure why it can’t take larger cards - I have an 8GB MicroSD HC card in my Nokia N95, and it was never even originally rated for that, but does work nevertheless. When I get my hands on a review unit I’ll pop the 8GB card in to see what happens. Set to cost AUD $899, it’ll probably be available cheaper on some kind of plan when it launches, although it’s not available yet – the party was designed to drum up some excitement for the phone when it actually launches “soon”. Continued on page 3. << First page <   1 2 3 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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