LG Goes Official with KE850 Prada

In the midst of the Apple iPhone fanfare, the other device received a fair amount of attention, LG's speculated KE850 Prada phone, has been officially announced by LG.

The KE850 Prada claims to to be the world’s 'first completely touch screen mobile phone', which is actually incorrect on two counts. First up, it has dedicated 'hard' Call and End buttons below the touch screen; and consequently, the second reason is that we've been seeing similar devices for years (O2 XDAs, i-mate JAMs and even Motorola's A1200 MING). Anyway, let's see what else the device has and how it stacks up with Apple's iPhone.

The KE850 is a tri-band GSM handset with EDGE support, unlike the quad-band iPhone. The device is smaller, though, and has smaller 3-inch screen, compared to the iPhone's 3.5-inch screen, with the resolution being fixed at 240x400 (vs. 320x480 on the iPhone). The user interface is Flash-based. There's no word on any revolutionary form of input (like the iPhone’s multi-touch).

It packs in a 2 megapixel camera like the iPhone (but with a Schneider-Kreuznach lens), but the Prada has an LED flash to spice up the night shots a bit. The internal storage doesn't go into gigabytes, but it does have a microSD card slot so you can add in upto 2 GB, I would presume.

The Prada has only Bluetooth 2.0, not WiFi like the iPhone. Also present is USB 2.0 with Mass Storage support so you can just drag and drop files without requiring any iTunes-like software! It comes with an audio/video player that supports MP3, AAC, WMA, and RealAudio, MPEG-4 and H.264/H.263. The document viewer supports Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, PDFs and text files too.

The LG KE850 Prada is expected to sell for around 600 Euros (Rs. 34,364) which is around US$780. That makes it more expensive than the iPhone's $699, but at least you can buy it next month, much, much before the iPhone.

Via AVing.