LG launches iPhone-like Prada phone

Hot on the heels of Apple’s iPhone, South Korean vendor LG Electronics officially unveiled the distinctly similar looking KE850 on Thursday.

LG has teamed up with fashion house Prada on the branding of the device, which looks to be an evolution of its highly successful Chocolate phone.

Images of the KE850 had been leaked prior to the introduction of the iPhone and, in terms of looks, the two have already been closely compared.

But now that the full specs for the KE850 have been released, it appears that similarities with the iPhone go beyond the cosmetic.

The Prada phone features a touch screen for almost all functions, although LG has kept a couple of hard keys for call answering and ending. Under the hood the unit has a music player, which it promises can multitask alongside other applications like messaging; a video player; a Macromedia Flash based user interface; and a document viewer for Word and PDF files amongst others.

The phone is EDGE tri-band and features a 2 megapixel camera, microSD card memory slot and USB mass storage functionality.

However, two significant shortcomings of the KE850 are its lack of wifi and full internet capabilities.

The Prada phone will be available from Eur600 in the UK, France, Germany and Italy as of late February, followed by countries in Asia from late March. The Korean version of the phone is scheduled to launch in the second quarter.