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Touched by an LG

By Damian Koh
Feb 12, 2008

LG's driving across two key points at this year's annual Mobile World Congress. One, that Skott Ahn, LG Electronics chief executive for Mobile, has said the company does not plan to buy over the ailing Motorola's handset business.

According to a Dow Jones report via cellular-news, the Korean company expects to ship more than 100 million phones this year and "we have never looked to buy Motorola", said Ahn. His response echos a similar comment by Sony Ericsson also saying it's not considering taking over Moto.


LG KF-600
The second is that the company is placing a lot of emphasis on touchscreen handsets following the launch of the Prada phone last year. Three new models were announced at this week's MWC and the one that caught our eye was the KF-700. The stylish handset resembles the Prada phone, but the unique selling point is it offers three different input methods. There's a 3-inch touchscreen LCD, slide-out alphanumeric keypad and a jog dial at the rear. While it's good to have all these options, we're not sure if there will be a learning curve involved which could end up confusing users.

The KF-600, on the other hand, features what LG has dubbed the InteractPad, which basically is a centralized touch-sensitive control panel that shows contextual-specific buttons. According to the release, the InteractPad comes with audio, visual and tactile cue properties, so that may alleviate concerns about touch-sensitive keys not being able to provide feedback when touched. Yes, what irony. Tactile feedback was first featured in the Motorola Razr2 series. Samsung's latest flagship device--the Soul--unveiled at the show also has a very similar kind of navigation control.

LG's third touchscreen handset--the KF-510--has slightly more pedestrian features. Notable points are its 10.9mm-slim side profile with a chassis made from a metal frame and tempered glass.

Although it wasn't mentioned on the LG press site, the company also has a new Symbian sat-nav phone on display at the event. The front portion resembles the Samsung Ultra Music SGH-F300 with a tiny LCD screen and alphanumeric keypad. But opening up the clamshell sideways reveals a full QWERTY keyboard similar to the one on the Nokia E90 Communicator. The internal layout mirrors the Asus M930 (which we call a waste of space), but from what we can see on the pictures, it appears that there could be speakers flanking the sides of the LCD screen and also a video call camera.

Read on for more information on all the handsets.

 

 
See LG's new touchscreen phones at MWC »

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