MWC 2009: LG's G910 "Touch Watch" and Arena phones get official

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Wow, things move fast from prototype to production these days. The LG GD-910 that we saw at CES is now the LG G910 Watch Phone, and due for release later this year.

It’s got a 1.4″ touchscreen face, HSDPA, and video calling capabilities. There’s also a text-to-speech engine for reading out texts to a bluetooth headset, and voice recognition stuff too. For maximum geekiness, precede every voice command with “Computer:”.

As well as the Touch Watch, there’s also the Arena, previously written about here. We were promised specs and a release date, and by jove, we’ve got them. Or most of them, anyway.

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There’s a 3″ touchscreen, running at WVGA resolution. It supposrts DivX and Xvid codecs. It can record DVD-resolution video, and video at up to 120fps for super-slo-mo playback. There’s 8GB of internal memory, and that can be expanded by another 32GB of MicroSD action.

There’s an immensely joyful 3.5mm headphone socket, and the aforementioned HSDPA, GPS and Wi-Fi. There’s a 5-megapixel camera, too, and geotagging for photos. There’s a tonne of inbuilt Google apps, too. All this is packed into a 105.9 x 55.3 x 11.95mm shell.

What’s missing? Well, I’d like a flip-out QWERTY keyboard, and maybe an upgrade on that camera, but beyond that, I can’t think of too much. The Arena seems like a very capable handset. I hope that it delivers on its promise, but I don’t think it’s topping the N97 in my “can’t wait for” phone list. How about you?

LG's new flagship multimedia handset – the "Arena" KM900

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I’ll admit it’s been a while since I was excited about an LG handset, despite my love for the company’s TFT monitors. This phone might change all that, however – it’s the LG Arena KM900, newly announced in advance of its unveiling at MWC 2009.

The biggest feature of the phone is its use of 3D. It’s got a completely new UI which is based on cubes, providing a number of different home screens. A touchscreen allows you to navigate between them, but from the picture to the right, it looks clearly iPhone-influenced.

The Arena will also have HSDPA, Wi-Fi, and aGPS, but beyond that we don’t know anything more. We’ll be finding out full specs, and hopefully a release date, next week at MWC so stay tuned for that. If you want to be the first to hear, then you might like to follow @techdigestnews on Twitter. Just an idea.

(via Official LG Blog)

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