The past few weeks have been a real test of my willpower - first, Di at Designers’ Block introduced me to Michael Michaud’s amazing nature inspired jewelry.

Water Lilies brooch, inspired by the painting of the same name by Claude Monet.

Then Register Hardware brought the Mobile Watch - complete with camera, Wi-Fi, 512MB memory card and GPS satnav - to my attention too:

As a result I had to spend a few minutes quietly repeating to myself ‘there is a big difference between wanting and affording’ before I could be trusted near the computer (or my purse!)
I think the major problem was that with these items combined my latest desires would have allowed me to feel like a bond girl and the agent himself simultaneously - a very tempting combination!

Fortunately Susie over at Style Bubble has bought a more affordable temptation to me - the East End Thrift Shop - and Dezeen have given me another affordable distraction by bringing the Rolf Sachs ‘ Take2′ exhibition to my attention and, thanks to the clever Mr Clayton, I have The Cans Festival to check out too!

So much to see but not to buy…

Today in London, we revealed the name of the third in the LG Black Label line of phones - the LG Secret. The Secret (KF750) is a slender & stylish handset with a slew of enriched technological features, including a 5MP ISO 800 camera, a 120fps QVGA video camera and DivX-certified recording and playback. The camera also boasts a range of filters and modes, as well as on-camera photo editing.

The phone has a touchscreen and an accelerometer motion sensor. It also has auto luminance control, adjusting the screen brightness automatically, saving both battery life and making it more comfortable for your eyes. Inside, the phone boasts an MP3 player and FM radio, a reader for Word, Excel and Powerpoint and is loaded with a specialised Google Package that with a dedicated interface for Google services such as GMail, Google Maps, YouTube and Blogger. It also has Bluetooth AutoSync to synchronise data seamlessly with your PC, and on the fun side a range of games that hook into the motion sensor.

With the philosophy of “style that lasts”, it’s been made out of some of toughest materials around, including carbon fibre and tempered glass, with neon touch navigation buttons that gently light up the interface.

For more information, you can download the press release or the feature list. More photos and coverage can be found in our sneak peak post from a couple of weeks ago, or on the dedicated microsite at secret.lgmobile.com

Update: We have some video of the phone too. Enjoy:

Special Monday morning treat - we’ve got a sneak preview of the third in the highly stylish LG Black Label series of handsets, following in the footsteps of the successful LG Chocolate and LG Shine. Like its two predecessors, the phone is a combination of cutting edge tech with brilliant design, and it will be one of the slimmest 5MP cameraphones out there. With the philosophy of “style that lasts”, it’s been made out of some of toughest materials around, including carbon fibre and tempered glass, to give the phone a timeless elegance.

The new phone’s name is still a secret, but all will be revealed on April 24th at our European launch. In the meantime we can give you a cheeky sneak peek with the photo to the right - enjoy. You can also see shots of the phone from the back, closed and alongside others in the same range. Enjoy!

Today is the 35th anniversary of the first mobile phone call.

On April 3rd, 1973 Dr. Martin Cooper, Motorola’s Corporate Director of R&D and patent holder for the “Radio Telephone System”, used the DynaTAC handset to make the first ever portable phone call. Who did he call? Joel Engel, Head of Research at Bell Labs and his rival in the field, to let him know he was too late! I’m not sure I could’ve resisted making that call in his place.

“Suddenly there was Captain Kirk talking on his communicator. Talking! With no wires!”

“To the rest of the world it was a fantasy. To me it was an objective.”

In the same article you discover Cooper is not alone in having Kirk and co as his muses:

Robert Haitani, the designer of the Palm Pilot, revealed to the San Francisco Chronicle, “my first sketches were influenced by the Enterprise bridge panels…Years later the first Treo (a combo phone and wireless PDA) had a form factor similar to the communicator. You could stand there and talk into it like Captain Kirk.”

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:

Last week I noticed BT have partnered with FON to create (wait for it..) BT FON (see what they did there?)

FON is “the largest Wi-Fi community in the world. FON is a Community of people making WiFi universal and free.” Essentially, ‘Foneros’ share their home Internet connections in exchange for free access to the Community’s FON Spots wherever they go.

Since Wi-Fi was introduced there have always been people, not necessarily intentionally, sharing their own or piggy-backing on other’s connections. For the very net-savvy and early adopters out there FON, which launched in late 2005, didn’t offer a first - you had years of fun inventing War-chalking, War-driving and all sorts of other methods which didn’t actually involve as much fighting as the names might suggest. But what FON did bring in to the equation was safety - a router designed specifically to allow secure shared WiFi access.

“From the beginning FON users believed in the concept of sharing and in the peoples’ ability to participate in building something important that would benefit everyone. With BT FON, those beliefs have proved to be well-founded.”

BT Group managing director, Gavin Patterson added:

“We are giving our millions of Total Broadband customers a choice and an opportunity. If they are prepared to securely share a little of their broadband, they can share the broadband at hundreds of thousands of FON and BT Openzone hotspots today, without paying a penny.”

“We have built a public Wi-Fi network and 12 Wireless Cities already, but today we are saying to customers, let’s build a Wi-Fi community together, which covers everywhere and serves everyone.”

You can find out more here.

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.

It’s London Fashion Week and the beautiful and the stylish are flocking to London to fight for that impossible to get Moss/Westwood ‘comeback’ ticket. What could be a more fitting time to welcome the new ‘Dark Silver’ Viewty?

Yes, LG are now offering up the sleek silver edition LG Viewty in addition to the original black. LG researched colour preferences across Europe, and silver was selected as the number one colour choice of consumers looking for a stylish, polished, premium phone that reflects their own style.

But it’s not just a revamp don’t worry, the silver Viewty has all the functions and capabilities which made the original so popular, but with an improvement as well as a new look.

“The new ‘Dark Silver’ Viewty has all the quality of the black version but in addition to the stylish stand-out colour, we have re-designed the jog wheel to make scrolling the menus easier following consumer feedback. Viewty gives consumers the opportunity to own a phone that makes a statement, with a new high-tech finish that sleek, smart and complements its overall design,” said Dr. Skott Ahn, President and CEO of LG Electronics Mobile Communications Company. “We knew we had something special when we created Viewty, and it turns out that over half a million customers agree with us.”

There will be even more colour choices for the LG Viewty, with it’s 5.0 megapixel camera and a 3.0-inch touchscreen, available later this year.

The photo site Flickr is great for a number of reasons - one of them being you can see what other’s photos have been taken with the LG Viewty, showing off its abilities.

This, for example, is a classy winter shot of ice on a tree branch:

21. Dezember 2007 by ernscht

The camera fares well indoors as well, as shown by this macro shot:

Xbox 360 Controller by Skyfall

And the indoor shots are proven with this dinky shot of a scale model:

New Rotterdam Central by jacco.org

I found all these photos and more at Flickr’s photos tagged with “Viewty”. There’s also a clutch of Viewty phone owners’ groups there - LG Viewty, Viewty KU 990 and Viewtyful. If you have a Viewty, join up and we’ll keep an eye out for your photos.

With the launch of the Viewty round the corner there’s a bit of buzz about LG’s latest handset. TechDigest have a report after having a play with it in Seoul (with some video available here) and we’re glad that they were impressed with the video playback and the camera:

Us bloggers can bang on about Viewty being an iPhone killer, but LG isn’t overtly fuelling the comparison, saying it sees Viewty as more focused on photography than music, with its five-megapixel camera.

I think you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone here who uses the term “iPhone killer” – while we’re firm believers in the awesomeness of our own phone we also have a good deal of respect for the iPhone. But we’ve taken a different tack and decided to concentrate on using our screen for our camera – once you’ve directly edited, cropped or enhanced photos and video with a touchscreen interface you wonder how you ever coped with fiddling with buttons and menu options on your old camera or phone. That’s where the technology truly transforms – so while the Viewty has a fully capable (and pretty good) MP3 functionality we’ve not made it the centrepiece attraction like the iPhone has. So please, no more talk of “iPhone killer” – it’s a great phone but a different phone too.

By the way – the Viewty has been nominated by Pocket Lint for best mobile phone of 2007 – thanks for that, guys! Awards are expected to be announced some time next month.