LG
KE850 Prada

When the LG Prada (KE850) was unveiled at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona it was one of the most talked about devices at the show and garnered strong media interest. At the press conference to announce the product, Prada confirmed it had been heavily involved in the design and specification of the phone. The fashion house stated that it had been approached several times to have its brand used on an existing mobile phone design, but LG was the first phone maker to offer a new product design partnership. Prada stressed that the partnership was unlikely to result in a large family of products with “possibly one more device to come”. The innovative touch-screen user interface reflected a shift from two-handed stylus-based solutions to a single-handed, “finger-scrolling” approach. At the start of 2007, Apple had unveiled the iPhone which wowed the world with its innovative new user interface, but it was clear that others such as LG had been working on similar solutions – as reflected in the Prada phone. In fact, LG's Prada phone was the world's first phone to ship with a capacitive touch display. Its touch screen enabled simple functions such as scrolling through a list of addresses, music files and photos. At the time it was considered extremely easy to use, and it arrived in the European market more than seven months before the iPhone. The Prada phone had relatively basic specifications. Most surprisingly it only supported offered tri-band GSM/EDGE rather than 3G connectivity. It also had a 2-megapixel camera with LED flash, a micro SD expansion slot, Bluetooth 2.0, USB 2.0 and 8GB of internal memory, an MP3 player and an Adobe Flash-based user interface.