Last night Helen & I had the pleasure of attending “Unlimited Drinks London“, one of the foremost social events for mobile professionals in the UK, organised by the tirelessly enthusiastic Ewan of SMSTextNews. We met plenty of interesting people, from tech bloggers such as James Whatley and David Stone, to the guys from travel journal startup Mapness, and had chats about everything from the future of LG’s phones to whether Twitter or Jaiku was better. For those of you who missed it, there should be some photos and video of the event coming later today.
Those of you who we met there and are checking this blog out for the first time - hello, it was nice meeting you, and we hope you stay - do also check out us on Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Finally, we also held a little prize draw for everyone who dropped their business card off at the event, and our congratulations go to Claire Jones and Stephen Wadeley who both won brand new LG KF600s to take home with them, and we hope they have a lot of fun with them!
I’ve talked about the KF600 in brief before but having played with it the past week I thought it apt to talk about the LG KF600, our new mid-range touchscreen phone.
The phone’s most distinctive feature is the dual screen. The first screen is a 240×320 pixel 2″ LCD screen, the same top-quality screens on many of our other phones. The second is a 240×176 pixel touchscreen called the InteractPad. The InteractPad replaces the standard navigation keys on the phone with a set of contextual icons that change according to what you’re doing. For example, when navigating the menu it displays a set of arrows, while when composing text messages, it provides buttons to change input settings or insert symbols.
The InteractPad is customisable, so you can have your favourite functions available on the main screen. It also allows for handwriting recognition, either via a stylus (availability varies according to country) or just your thumbnail (which I found surprisingly easy after a little bit of practice). Like the touchscreen on the Viewty, the InteractPad has haptic feedback (i.e. it vibrates with every press), meaning pressing it is more intuitive to handle. The overall effect is a compromise between full-touchscreen phones like the Viewty, and more traditional interfaces, with an ultimate focus on being as user friendly as possible.
Both screens can be skinned according to eight different themes, including four by the renowned late pop artist Keith Haring, or customised with your own wallpaper. Speaking of pictures, the phone comes with a 3.0 Megapixel camera (capable of video), and also has an MP3 player. It come with 25MB of internal storage and an SD card slot capable of taking up to 4GB capacity.
It has a warm feel to the hand and is pretty slimline, at just 14.1mm thick and weighing 107 grammes. It comes in pastel pink, shiny pink, wine red or good old-fashioned black. For a closer look, take a look at the KF600 Specification, or better still check out the demo video below to get a real feel for it:
We’re pleased to announce not just one but two new phones for the European market this week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
The first is the LG KF600, which has already been out in the United States and has won an iF product design award for its InteractPad keypad. As well as the usual number keys which slide out, the InteractPad keys re virtual and context-specific, meaning they can change to the task at hand, making the audio player, camera and videocamera dead easy to use, as you can see below:
The phone is out now - for more information check out this press release.
The second is our brand new multimedia phone, the LG KF700, which has a three-inch touchscreen as well as an alphanumeric keypad that slides out, and a shortcut dial to make navigation quick and easy. The phone features a fully-featured web browser, letting you view sites like YouTube and use Ajax-powered sites like Google Mail or Reader. While the touchscreen allows ultra-fast 3G HSDPA browsing, the slide-out keypad allows a touch of familiarity for those who prefer it to dial or text:
It will be available from mid-March - for more information check out this press release.
