LG 'PRADA' - A direct competitor to Apple's iPhone

LG Electronics on Thursday announced the launch of its first completely touch-screen mobile phone, KE850, in association with PRADA, one of the world’s leading brands in the luxury goods industry. The South Korean company said it will start selling the new mobile phone that incorporates a buttonless touch-screen next month.

With a large touch-screen display and little else, the ‘LG Prada’ at first glance looks a lot like the Cupertino, California based Apple Inc.’s recently launched iPhone, combining three products-a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device with desktop-class email, web browsing, searching and maps-into one small and lightweight hand-held device.

LG's Prada Phone, which is a unique, sophisticated and elegant mobile phone with the first complete advanced touch interface, which eliminates the conventional keypad making the overall usage experience a highly tactile one, is a real breakthrough in the industry, and can be proved as a direct competitor to the Apple iPhone.

The KE850 is actually smaller than the iPhone and features a user interface built on top of Adobe's Macromedia Flash technology. Its extra wide LCD screen maximizes visual impact, allowing the user to benefit from several key features of the phone. Like the iPhone, it also includes 2 megapixel camera featuring Schneider-Kreuznach lens, and video player and document viewer capacity.

This ultra thin (just 12 mm, merely 0.4 mm more than the iPhone), sleek and simplistic phone has tri-band (900/1800/1900) and EDGE capabilities and can playback music files in MP3, ACC, ACC+, WMA, RA as well as MPEG4 video files.

The KE850 supports Bluetooth 2.0 and USB 2.0 connectivity and includes a Micro SD memory slot, which allows user to increase memory capacity for images, music and film clips.

The PRADA phone by LG will go on sale in late February for $US780 at mobile phone dealers and Prada stores in Britain, France, Germany and Italy, and comes to Asian countries, including Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, in March.

The company has no plans for US release, said Judy Pae, a spokeswoman for the company in Seoul. However, the Korean version of the KE850 phone is scheduled to launch in the second quarter of 2007.

Apple's revolutionary iPhone is due for release in U.S. markets in June with a cost of $US599 for the high-end model with 8 gigabytes of internal memory.

LG, maker of the hugely popular Chocolate Phone and the Italian fashion brand Prada have showed their immense efforts on every aspect of the product, from handset development to marketing, to provide an uncompromising quality of Prada design with the trademark technological innovation of LG mobile.