Dec 29, 2008 04:43 AM
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Details of a new LG watch phone, likely to be announced at CES, have trickled out through the company's Korean site. And surprise! It looks hard to use. But not—and this is important—unusable.
The first thing to notice is the specs: unlike last time around, they're actually pretty solid. The GD910, as it's called, will support 3G, HSDPA, Bluetooth, text-to-speech and speech-to-text, and finally, videoconferencing via a front-mounted camera.
These capabilities, far from being the useless feature bloat that we see on gimmicky hardware like this, seem to be geared toward making this wrist piece bearable. Don't want to fiddle with little watch buttons to make a call? Use the touchscreen. Don't want to type on a tiny on-screen keypad? Talk to your phone. Don't want to walk around with a watch to your face like some kind of portly, neckbearded, wolfshirted FBI agent? Hook up a Bluetooth headset and you'll just look like a nerdy soccer dad. And videoconferencing, mercifully built in, is probably the most important feature to have on a quasi-spy gadget like this.
That said, there are still a few problems that will be unavoidable in this form-factor, the largest of which LG has implicitly acknowledged with their product photos: unless you are a young child with young child fingers, don't plan on having an easy go of it. [UnwiredView]
Send an email to John Herrman, the author of this post, at jherrman@gizmodo.com.
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