Technology Meets High Fashion

Most tech savvy women are equally fashion savvy so LG's new Prada phone seems like the perfect new product.
Complete with a touch-screen driven interface, South Korea's LG is looking to bask a bit in the anticipatory halo surrounding Apple's forthcoming IPhone.

According to digitaltrends.com, The LG Prada phone is unlikely to ever see U.S. markets—it's a tri-band GSM unit with EDGE data service—although it should hit retailers in the U.K., France, Germany, and Italy in February, and reach Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore by March, with a Korean release following in the second quarter of 2007.

The phone sports a 2 megapixel camera (with a Schneider-Kreuznach lens), a built-in media player capable of handling music (MP3, AAC, AC+, WMA, and RealAudio) and video (MPEG4, H.263, H.264), along with a document viewing which can display PowerPoint, Word, Excel, PDF, and text documents.

The fashion-phone sports a 400 by 240 LCD touch screen, and the phone is operated on-screen via a touch screen interface built using Macromedia Flash. The phone also offers Bluetooth 2.0, USB 2.0, microSD storage, and Internet connectivity via mobile data services, rather than Wi-Fi.

And keeping in mind that all good things come in small packages, the whole unit measures just 98.8mm by 54mm by 12mm (3.9 by 2.1 by .47 inches).

The drawbacks: although many are comparing the device to the forthcoming Apple iPhone—and noting that it's a bit smaller—consider that the Prada phone offers a skimpy 8 MB storage (opting instead for microSD cards), doesn't support Wi-Fi connectivity—and the iPhone's will pack a larger display (480 by 320 pixels).

But with a name like Prada, the €600 price tag (about USD $770) seems like a well-justified splurge.