Mobile Phones Blog

LG has just announced that worldwide sales of their highly successful Cookie touchscreen have exceeded the 2 million mark. Since LG took the first batch of Cookies out of its oven last October, they’ve been flying off the shelves like hot cakes.

The LG Cookie was a hit right from the start - a nicely designed touchscreen tablet that wasn’t too expensive. The Cookie comes with a 3-inch display, auto-rotate, a basic 3 megapixel camera and support for all of the popular music files; good enough features to be attractive to the average consumer, but not so advanced that they drove the cost of the handset through the roof.

“LG wanted to allow more people to benefit from the advanced touch technology that we have introduced in previous touchscreen handsets,” said Dr. Skott Ahn, President and CEO of LG Electronics Mobile Communications Company. “Because of our extensive background in touchscreen handsets, we are now able to bring this innovative technology to consumers at an affordable price without compromising on feature quality.”

Available in a variety of flavours, including the standard Black (dark chocolate) the incredibly popular Pink (strawberry), and the O2-exclusive White (vanilla icing), the LG Cookie has been a big hit in markets all across the world, and will almost certainly continue to be a strong seller throughout 2009.

The hottest smartphones could be coming to UK users at rockbottom prices from May, with O2 set to slash the cost of owning a 16Gb iPhone 3G, reportedly in advance of a new iPhone launch, and T-Mobile doing the same for the G1.

It looks increasingly likely that Apple will release an upgraded iPhone 3G this June or July in the UK, but it is still very unclear what this will look like. The pundits are split between those who expect a ’superphone’ to fend off the Palm Pre, LG Arena and others – with heavyweight memory, video, camera and other features where the iPhone has lagged behind the big hitters of the smartphone market; plus enhancements to the browser, widgets and multitouch experience.

After all, Apple’s place at the top of the multitouch pile, which has been proven to drive mobile web usage, is now threatened by Palm, LG and others, and even the lawsuits that Apple is said to be preparing won’t stop the challengers if users take to their upgrades.

But most major players, like the Android community and Nokia, are still lagging behind on multitouch and other important user interface features, and so other commentators think Apple will stick with its advantage at the high end and focus on a whole new format for the iPhone to increase its appeal to the midrange mobile web users and those feeling the credit crunch.

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Going one further from their deliberately under-specced Cookie touchscreen, models of which have flown off shelves like some proverbial cake of a not-cold temperature, LG have just released a pair of ultra low-end budget models with the aim of annexing the pockets of those who’ve had to cut back because of that whole recession thing you might have heard about in the news.

The GD330 and the GB125 are the latest low-end phones to emerge from the LG roster, and will likely go for some stupidly low prices - ideal if you’re on SIM-only or PAYG and you need a quick replacement that’s not going to kill your wallet until the next pay day.

The GB125 is a credit-crunch friendly clamshell that’s so no frills, it doesn’t even have an external display. It instead informs you of missed calls, messages and battery life by way of three LED’s. Did we mention that the GB125 also doesn’t have a camera? It does, however have an FM Radio…

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After the runway success of the Pink version of their wallet-friendly Cookie touchscreen handset, LG have just announced the addition of the new White LG Cookie to the range. Launched today, the White LG Cookie is available exclusively on O2, and as such features a metallic blue stripe around the edge, giving it a minty fresh look and feel.

Like its black and pink siblings, the White LG Cookie features an intuitive 3″ interface, an accelerometer for auto-rotating, and support for a wide range of audio and video file formats and codecs - this combined with the capacity for easily housing 8GB microSD cards without suffering horrendous slowdown makes the LG Cookie an ideal low-cost solution for those who want a music playing touchscreen phone but don’t want to break the bank.

The main menu is effortlessly customisable, allowing you to drag and drop shortcuts to the music player, calendar, camera and whatever you want - practically every feature and application available on the Cookie can have a shortcut dragged up to the main menu screen, allowing you access to virtually every nook and cranny available.

We’ve not got any pics of the White LG Cookie other than the one top left, sent to us by LG - so we decided to mock up a picture of the standard black LG Cookie with a picture of some Oreos on it’s main screen.

Word on the street is that Samsung are all set to unveil a 12 Megapixel camera phone to the world at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, bringing the current Smartphone Megapixel arms race to its sadly predictable conclusion.

With current mobile chipsets only theoretically being able to handle a maximum of around 12 Megapixels, it was only a matter of time before one of the big players announced the development of a cameraphone touting this kind of firepower.

Given than both Samsung and LG brought out the 8 Megapixel big guns last year – the Innov8 and Pixon from Samsung and the Renoir from LG – we had money on it being either one of the Korean tigers to be the first to raise the bar to the next level.

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Following the crumb trail of the Cookie, LG’s credit crunch friendly touchscreen offering, comes the LG KP500 Cookie Pink, a new version of the phone that’s, erm, coloured pink.

This is good news for Paris Hilton, and other fans of the colour traditionally associated with the ‘fairer sex’ and all things cute and fluffy.

The LG Cookie turned several heads when it was announced last year, thanks to its attractive design, large 3″ touchscreen display, auto-rotating accelerometer, and support for a whole lotta audio and video file formats, making it the perfect choice for those who wanted to get all touchy feely with a multimedia touchscreen phone, but couldn’t justify spending a Sultan’s ransom on a fancy new bit of electronic kit to themselves.

The touchscreen fascia of the Cookie is eminently customisable; you can drag and drop a series of widgets on to the main menu screen, stuff such as a clock, calendar, and shortcuts to various features such as the music player, and commands, like Play/Pause, Skip etc.

You also get a neat little telescopic stylus with the Cookie, allowing you to tap, drag and poke at things on the screen without you getting fingerprints all over it.

Originally available in black, the Cookie now comes coated in a hue halfway between red and white, and is set for a release at the end of the month, just in time for Valentine’s Day. As well as a big old touchscreen and a fetching pink jacket, the LG Cookie also comes with Bluetooth 2.1, a 3 Megapixel camera, and 48MB of on board memory which can be bulked up to 8GB through the microSD slot.

UPDATED: Please check out the LG Cookie Pink review on our main site for more information.

First, it was phones such as the contra-rotating Motorola AURA and handsets from Nokia’s Vertu range which brought levels of precision usually associated with high quality watch making to the mobile world. Then, luxury timepiece manufactures such as Tag Heuer responded with mobile handsets of their own. Now, the movement has come full circle with the announcement of LG’s forthcoming GD910 ‘watch phone’ handset, which, given that its worn around the wrist like a traditional watch, really ought to be called a wrist set.

The GD910 is a tiny touchscreen phone which doubles as a keypad for dialling numbers and tapping out texts and emails, and, allegedly, high speed internet navigation.

It will also boast a front facing camera allowing for videocalling, MP3 playback, and – thankfully – comes with Bluetooth, meaning that you don’t have to hold the watch phone up to your mouth when you want to talk to someone.

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If you’re thinking of ordering a mobile phone in time for Christmas Day, then you’d better make sure to order before midday on the 22nd of December, and I’m telling you why; cos that’s when the networks are shutting up shop for the season.

So if you had set your sights on having an iPhone under your Christmas tree or wanted to get a T-Mobile G1, LG Renoir, INQ1, or Sony Ericsson C905 for your friend, partner, mum, dad, sibling, or you just fancied treating yourself, then place your order before next Monday lunchtime to avoid disappointment!

We’re also closing shop here at Mobile Phones for Christmas and the New Year – congratulations again to the winner of our Nokia N96 competition.

Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

- the Mobile Phones team

The LG Wine KF300 clamshell has just been released exclusively on the Orange network. The LG Wine is one of those whip-smart flip phones which is high on design, but not so hot on features, but is sure to attract a certain type of customer, one who wants a phone to be a phone first and foremost, but wants its looks, if not its features to be on the cutting edge.

The LG Wine boasts a reflective anodized effect finish, into which is hidden a discreet exterior TFT, displaying the usual secondary screen fare; signal strength, battery life, time, that sort of thing. Much like the Sony Ericsson Z610i, the secondary display retreats from view when the phone is inactive, only kicking into life when you open up the handset, or if you have a message or missing call waiting to be returned.

It has to be said that the features of the LG Wine aren’t really that amazing; a benchmark standard 2 Megapixel camera, capable of recording video (which unfortunately comes sans flash or autofocus) and a rather basic MP3 player – but then again, this is simply a decent mid range phone designed for the fashion conscious and feature agnostic.

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Canadian vendor RIM, best known for its BlackBerry business email phones, is making a major push into the consumer smartphone market. It wants to break out of its strongholds in north America and enterprise accounts, but its shareholders are nervous about the amount of marketing and R&D cash it will have to spend to draw attention away from phones from Apple, Nokia and the others. A new close alliance with Vodafone may help solve RIM’s problem and get its attractive new touchscreen handset, the Storm, into the hearts as well as the hands of European phone connoisseurs.

Vodafone is always keen to find handset partners that are willing to create phones largely to the carrier’s specifications, which means working with phonemakers that are smaller and more malleable than Nokia or Samsung. It has mainly succeeded at the low end, but now RIM may prove the tame vendor Vodafone needs to create a superphone to its own requirements.

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