Shame LG's designer phone ain't 3G compatible

---

Product: Prada Phone by LG (KE850)
Web: www.lge.com
Price: Free on contract. £400 SIM-free
Tech Specs: here
Talktime: 8 hours (estimated)
Standby time: 72 hours (estimated)
Type: Tri-Band (900/1800/1900MHz) plus EDGE

---

A DESIGNER mobile phone that's intended to be mass market. An odd idea - but that's the plan with this Prada Phone by LG.

The KE850 - to use the proper model designation - is about looks, looks and looks. Significantly, it also boasts a touch sensitive screen.

So it'll beat Apple's iPhone to the post since it's available in the UK from 25th March 2007. This isn't a smartphone, however, it's a regular handset which just so happens to have a touch driven user interface.

The best demo of the handset's graphics capabilities came courtesy of the optional 'fish' idle screen. Touch the screen and the goldfish that swims around starts to head in the indicated direction. Pointless but fun.

Good points are its supplied 256 MB microSD card and a two megapixel Carl Zeiss built-in camera with LED Flash. Bad points are that with the sample the INQ was shown, the memory card could only be swapped via a battery removal. Which is strange because the specs say it has an "external memory slot".

The other downside to this particular handset is that it is only 2.75G [EDGE plus GPRS] not a full 3G phone. We're talking about the GSM version here, of course. For the money it really should be 3G compatible.

Especially since it supports email. The catch is that the Prada Phone offers an 'onscreen' rather than physical keypad. Which is OK for text but there's no 'soft' QWERTY keyboard for creating emails.

Luckily the KE850 supports Bluetooth so LG will be supplying a special Prada Bluetooth headset to go with the phone. As standard the handset comes with hands-free headphones so you can listen to music, etc. The snag is that the headphones connect via the mini-USB port not a standard jackplug.

Still, the Prada phone makes a perfectly acceptable MP3 player as well as a video player. Touch the screen and you can watch movies in landscape rather than portrait mode. So it's good enough to take on a video iPOD.

The whole black and white Prada look works very well and this handset really does look the business. It's the natural successor to the Motorola Razr, so when you pluck your mobile phone out of your pocket or pocketbook, you look the part.

It's a real shame that this version isn't 3G compatible otherwise the INQ would have very definitely lusted after one. µ

Bartender's Verdict