LG Japan hosted a Mobile Design Contest and with the winners announced the phones were put on display at a Tokyo Designers Week event. Although the phones are only concepts and may never actually become products, its always interesting to see the designs and concepts that come out of these competitions. The winning design was “Planet Phone”, the circular smooth phone takes inspiration from our planet and the people on it to develop this unique clam shell mobile. The top of the phone has LED lights embedded in it. The lights represent the users friends and the frequency of contact between them. The more you keep in touch with your friends the more the lights stay in the center, but as your communication drops the LEDs retreat to the outskirts of the phone. Our second favorite design is the Temprature Phone concept. Similar to the Planet Phone concept it aims to raise awareness of your friends. The back of the phone has a number of tiles which can be removed from the phone and shared with friends. You can give your friends a tile with your name on it and vise versa, this provides a unique design for every cell phone. The Temperature phone also has LED lights behind the name tiles which glow according to the temprature of the place your

  LG has quietly released a new affordable clamshell, the LG KP152. For the moment, the handset officially appears only on the LG Brazil website, but it’s said it will be released in Europe too – in Russia for the beginning, starting this month. LG KP152 is surely an elegant device. Unfortunately, its features are not at all ones to crave for. The phone might represent the beginning of LG’s new campaign to conquer emerging markets with basic devices. Here are the main specs and capabilities of LG KP152: Tri band GSM/GPRS connectivity TFT display with 65K colors (its resolution is not known) FM radio SMS, MMS VGA photo camera 800 mAh Li-Ion battery Talk time: up to 3.5 hours Stand by time: up to 350hours 80 grams 88 x 47 x 17.3 millimeters LG KP152 will have a retail price of somewhere around $100. As seen in the images above, the clamshell will come in at least two color versions: red and black.

  Other than creating more smartphones for 2009, apparently LG is also looking towards the low-end market for additional market share. LG CEO Jung Do-hyun himself said in a statement that the company will go with aggressive price points for its products in emerging markets. Jung further adds, “We will settle for a single-digit profit margin in the low-end market by 2011,” and says that the company will expand outsourcing channels to help cut costs and maintain flexibility for the rapidly changing emerging markets. Currently, the majority of LG handsets are either high-end smartphones, or luxury phones. Hopefully, they will start on a new campaign soon that will see the rise of lower-end but still highly functional handsets from them. As one insider points out, LG knows that they are “weaker than rivals in low-end portfolios in emerging markets.” But the company is “in transition and mulling over whether to go one-step further,” regarding this.

  LG and Bell have announced a new fashion phone called the LG “Reveal” with no hesitation to promote it as looking like a make-up compact. This will be available in a flowery designed purple and black. It boasts a 2.4 inch high res screen, full QWERTY keyboard with a 2 Megapixel Camera with zoom and brightness controls, video recorder, speakerphone, EVDO, Bluetooth enabled. To kick this beast off Bell has come up with a “Shimmer Kit”. This will include a Bluetooth headset that is all blinged out with Swarovski crystals.

  The smartphone market isn’t exactly the realm of LG, whose handsets often offer fashion before function, but if a report from Telecoms Korea is to be believed, it looks like the company may be completely changing its stance for the next year. It appears that LG has realized it will need to start producing powerful smartphones of its own if it wants to keep its market influence. From Telecoms Korea’s report, industry observers have noted that, “LG mobile phones made strides in hardware but remained weak in smartphones, which require sophisticated software. The priority should be put on software than making good-looking phones like Prada and Viewty.” It is said that LG plans to release over 10 new smartphones in 2009, and that at least one of them has been confirmed to be running on Windows Mobile. Meanwhile, Symbian and Linux-based smartphones are also being considered by LG, but will only make them if they see that market response is good. Along with their plans for smartphones in 2009, LG has also revealed its goals of making these devices “million sellers.” Well, that should be easy, but only if LG doesn’t screw things up and gets it

  We already knew that LG Prada II, a sequel to the first deisgner LG Prada phone is coming this year. And we also had a pretty good idea of what the LG Prada 2 specs and looks will be. Well, now, in it’s usual pre-announcement/official announcement way LG has pre-announced the new LG KF900 Prada 2 phone. The LG Prada II KF900 specs that LG confirmed so far include 7.2 Mbps HSDPA connectivity, 3″ touchscreen, side-sliding QWERTY keyboard, 5 megapixel camera, full HTML Web browsing and Wi-Fi connectivity. And we also have an official picture of LG KF900 Prada 2 phone, so we won’t have to keep guessing what the thing will look like: Seeing how the official Prada 2 spec list came close to the one we told you about back in April, I think it’s a good time to fill in the missing details: Quad-band GSM (850/900/1800/1900). WCDMA 900/2100, 7.2 Mbps HSDPA connectivity 3″ WQVGA 400×240 px TFT touchscreen 5 megapixel camera front camera for video calls Wi-Fi b/g connectivity USB 2.0, Bluetooth Full HTML browsing FM-Radio TV-out microSDHC memory card slot (up to 8GB) slide-out QWERTY keyboard About the only thing missing in LG Prada II KF900 spec sheet seems to be a GPS sensor. And since there’s no

Touch screen, accelerometer, carbon and glass - such a mixture is by far not common even among smartphones. LG Secret - is an embodiment of the notorious idea "all and now". The phone combines in itself a quite fashionable accessory and a technically sated (sometimes even over sated) device. If we shall remember the development history of the LG trendy series, than these will be its most confident steps on the way to success. Firstly, a rough agiotage and record sales had surrounded the Chocolate model and its successors (with the recognizable glossy case and the touch-pad block). Some time later, the company announced the Shine series which has introduced thin outlines and cold shine of metal. After releasing basically opposite models by philosophy, LG was considered in almost crisis of ideas which now experiences Motorola. For the majority, perhaps, long time was a secret: what model will become the continuation of the manufacturer’s trendy collection? Well, the answer to this question sounds the same - Secret. The Design A scrupulous eye will determine on the phone’s exterior, separate features of a whole range of previous models. The "skeleton" of this phone in many aspects is similar with the earlier tested KF510 (for example,