Orange releases LG watch phone for 'just' £500

Posted on 20 Aug 2009 at 22:26

Orange has announced that it will exclusively sell LG's LG-GD910 watch phone, with a special introductory price of 'just' £500 for pay-as-you-go customers.

The new phone will go on sale at 9am on 27 August 2009 in Orange's Bond Street store. A limited number will also be made available through Orange's online store.

"The LG Touchscreen Watchphone is one of several 'future phones' we??re bringing to UK consumers this year. Being handmade, the device really is highly original and exclusively limited - so you'll be the envy of all your friends if you??re fortunate enough to get your hands on one," said Francois Mahieu, director of devices at Orange.

The phone has Bluetooth built it and voice recognition, so it can be operated entirely without touching it. Should you need to do something a bit more discrete or with more delicacy, a touchscreen interface is also available.

It's not all good news, though. The phone has a standby time of 200 hours, but only a talk time of two hours. If you talk a lot you'll need to keep it well charged if you still want to know what time it is. The screen's also too small for web browsing; something we've come to expect to do on a modern phone.

The size also leads to another problem: texting. The keyboard takes up almost the entire screen, leaving a tiny box that's big enough to display just a single word. In Orange's official video of the watch (see below), it didn't demonstrate what happened when you wanted to type more than one word. There's also no information on how much it will cost when it's no longer available for the special introductory price.

Even with these obstacles, the LG-GD910 looks really cool. We haven't been this excited about a watch that was also something else since we were kids and Casio released the calculator watch. Let's just hope that LG's watch has more longevity.