LG Teases Latest ‘Black Label’ Cell Phone Ahead of Launch

LG has begun teasing the upcoming launch of the third cell phone in its style-focused “Black Label” family of handsets.

The phone, the name of which wasn’t announced, will follow on from LG’s popular Chocolate and Shine handsets that launched in 2006 and 2007.

It will be officially unveiled and named at a product launch in London on April 24, but ahead of that LG released three images of the new phone.

It’s a slider-type handset with a shiny face, three shortcut buttons for answering a call, hanging up on a call and a cancel button sit below the shiny face and the upper part of the phone’s body is covered in what appears to be a faux leather plastic. Previous LG phones have touch-sensitive keys underneath the shiny cover and the new phone appears to have enough room for such a keypad but it’s impossible to tell from the images if there is indeed one.

The only technical detail available was the inclusion of a 5-megapixel camera.

The phone will first be available in Europe before being launched in other regions around the world, said LG.

Nokia, RIM Lead in Phone Innovation: Study

Nokia is the mobile device maker with the best innovation and implementation strategies, followed by Research In Motion (RIM), which produces the popular BlackBerry smartphone, and Samsung, according to a recent analyst report.

The ranking was issued by technology market research firm ABI Research, whose innovation scores for the 10 companies included were based on a handful of factors, including choice of partnerships with cellular carriers, distribution channels, relative cost, hardware scalability, interface customization, handset differentiation, patent portfolio, battery life, handset size, support for third party application developers and operating system source code licenses, among others. ABI’s implementation rankings were based on factors like smartphone shipments, brand equity, the number of handset models available, choice of OS, smartphone market share, smartphone average selling prices, distribution networks, operator relationships, and manufacturing facilities.

Nokia scored the highest in both innovation and implementation.

“Nokia’s commitment to driving smart OS into a wider range of devices, and the success of its N series devices, especially the N95, gives it a huge market presence,” said Stuart Carlaw, ABI research director, in a statement.

Espoo, Finland-based Nokia is also the world’s leading producer of smartphones, and the Symbian operating system (OS) found within the vast majority of Nokia handsets is the most widely used mobile OS, followed by Microsoft’s Windows Mobile and RIM’s BlackBerry OS, respectively, according to Canalys, another technology market research firm.

Nokia may be the global smartphone leader, but in the enterprise space RIM is king with nearly three-quarters of business users, a ChangeWave survey recently found. Palm is RIM’s closest competitor for enterprise smartphone users with 18 percent of the market, followed by Motorola’s nine percent share and Nokia’s seven percent of users, according to the ChangeWave survey.

ABI also predicts that the worldwide market for smartphones will triple over the coming five years from 10 percent of the total handset market in 2007 to 31 percent by 2013.

ABI’s full ranking of the top 10 smartphone vendors is as follows:

1. Nokia
2. RIM
3. Samsung
4. Motorola
5. Sony Ericsson
6. High Tech Corp (HTC)
7. Palm
8. LG
9. Sharp
10. Hewlett-Packard (HP)

LG Launches Widescreen Entertainment Notebooks

LG announced the launch of its new range of widescreen entertainment notebooks — the E200 and the E300.

The latest range of entertainment notebooks come with a 12.1-inch (E200) and 13.3-inch (E300) widescreen along with power saving module which offers extended battery life.

The notebooks are powered by Intel Core 2 Duo processor technology. The E200 as well as the E300 notebooks have a curl-fit design with LG Fine Bright LCD technology that delivers vivid and life like images.

The notebooks include ATI Radeon Xpress 1250 chipset and an 1.3MP LG Smart Cam. The new notebooks also feature a 5-in-1 Multimedia Card Reader (XD/SD/MMC/MS/MS Pro), an Express Card Slot (34) and a built-in DVD Writer.

The notebooks have a glossy look and are currently available in black color. The High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) technology provides uncompressed, crystal-clear digital video and audio via a single cable. The user just needs to connect an HDMI cable to digital TV or LCD monitor and can experience an improved quality of digital entertainment contents on the notebook.

The E200 and E300 are available for Rs. 51,500 and Rs. 57,000 respectively.