Touchscreen watch phone: LG GD19 arriving in UK next week
Thursday, August 20th, 2009The future is here. Or I suppose you could say that the future has been here for a while, but they’d never got it quite right in order for it to become commercially popular. Sure, the famous Casio calculator watches have their own cult following even now, but this wristwatch is packing rather more than just number crunching.
For all those James Bond wannabes who want a wristwatch that does much more than just tell you the time, the wait will soon be over. The hand made LG GD19 was first presented at this year’s CES in January, and gained some popularity when it was found to be pretty darned useable, against all odds.
The tough stuff out of the way: how does it work? Well, it has a pretty decent speakerphone on it, but you’d certainly be better off with a Bluetooth headset. The watch packs stereo Bluetooth, so it’s not a bad choice for listening to music on the go, either. You can dial numbers either by asking it ever so nicely thanks to its voice-activated dialling, or with the onscreen keypad; and texting is performed via the touchscreen keyboard. There’s even a VGA camera built-in, and for the truly image conscious, there’s even a choice of 8 different faceplates so you can make your watchphone your own. Check out the phone demo below for a closer look.
Hopefully the £500 price tag will prevent thousands of teenagers across the country from giving loud demonstrations of their new gizmo (and all included ringtones) on the back of buses. Since only a limited number are being made, LG are looking to gauge public reaction to see if the form factor will really take off if made more publicly available.
On sale from August 27th and available only on Orange, this really could be one to watch.
(Sorry.)
