LG Electronics officially announced the launch of its slim-line LG Mini touchscreen phone today, Wednesday. According to LG, this is the first feature phone to offer an HTML5-capable browser. The WebKit-based "Phantom" promises not only the possibility of viewing videos directly in the browser, but also a better mobile Internet experience overall.
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"Compared to our last generation of multimedia mobile phones on the web, we are achieving a performance increase of up to 50 percent," emphasizes Thomas Fritz, Key Account Manager Mobile Phones at LG Austria, in an interview with pressetext. This is also due to the better hardware, but according to an estimate by an LG software engineer, the WebKit browser accounts for around two thirds of this increase.
Snacking on the Apple trend
According to LG, Phantom offers a faster and more stable Internet experience on the mobile phone, for which the HTML5 support is partly responsible. The LG Mini is the first feature phone to rely on a trend for which Apple is not least responsible. The fact that there is no Flash on the iPhone and iPad in particular has already led to more and more websites relying on HTML5 for video playback.
"I think this is an attempt to ride the wave of web apps. Since LG does not specifically rely on a platform of its choice, that would be logical," said Julien Theys, an analyst at Screen Digest, opposite pressetext. In principle, such a modern browser is now becoming a minimum requirement in order to still be able to compete with smartphone platforms. This is all the more true since more and more relatively cheap smartphones are in prospect, especially with Android.
PC synchronization
In addition to the new browser, the Air-Sync functionality in particular should score points in the LG Mini. This enables information such as contact details and calendar entries to be synchronized wirelessly with the PC. With History Sync, on the other hand, the company offers the possibility of comparing the 100 most recently visited websites and thus being able to surf the web easily from any device.
The 99-gram device with 3,2-inch touchscreen offers social networking functions, a five-megapixel camera and radio receiver, among other things. For mobile data connections, HSDPA is supported with up to 7,2 megabits per second. The market launch takes place in the course of the month, whereby the LG Mini will come to around 400 euros without a contract.(ck)
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