If the pre-Mobile World Congress press kit is to be believed, it is the world's smallest full touchscreen handset in the market for now. "We developed the LG Mini in response to specific requests from actual consumers who were unhappy with current full touchscreen phones that are too bulky, too clunky and too expensive," declares the President and CEO of LG Electronics Mobile Communications Dr. Skott Ahn. "The easily pocketable LG Mini delivers great looks at a reasonable price, along with the trendy features that people want." Indeed, while it lives up to the "Mini" name in looks, size and pocketability, there's nothing "mini" about its feature set.
Upscale Features
The LG Mini is a dual band 3G/UMTS(900/2100) with HSDPA at 7.2 MBps and HSUPA at 2 MBps. It is also a standard quad band GSM (850/900/1800/1900) with GPRS/EDGE on the 2G network. Data connectivity comes with WiFi 802.11b/g with DLNA, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP and microUSB 2.0. There's also a built-in GPS receiver with Assisted GPS
For an exquisite imaging, it has a 5-megapixel autofocus camera that features image stabilization, face/smile detection, geo-tagging and VGA video recording at 15fps. A front-facing secondary camera supports 3G video calls.
Its stand-out feature is a 3.2-inch TFT LCD resistive touchscreen with WideVGA 480 x 854 pixel resolution supporting 256k colors. There's multitouch with gesture control, an accelerometer, an ambient light sensor and scratch resistance glass surface. Multimedia features come with usual media players for all the popular audio and video file formats including DivX and Xvid. You also get Dolby Mobile, FM stereo with RDS and a 3.5 mm headphone jack.
You get a decent phone memory at 330 MB plus up to 1,000 phonebook entries with photocall. You can expand this with a hot-swappable microSD for up to 32 GB. A 900 mAh Lithium-ion battery (LGIP-550N) powers up the handset.
Software-wise, the handset uses LG's proprietary OS the popular S-Class UI on top. It comes pre-bundled with a document viewer for MS Office and PDF files, a WAP-enabled HTML browser with Flash video as well as email client support. LG positions it as a social networking aware handset with apps like the Social Network Feed that automatically updates your Facebook and twitter accounts, a Social Network Connect for getting in touch with your SNS friends easier than on a PC and a Social Address Book containing all your online SNS contacts.
Availability
Release of the new LG Mini GD880 is planned starting this March in key European cities with April for the UK and elsewhere thereafter. Pricing will be disclosed as the handset reaches its markets on a country-to-country basis.
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