BlackBerry-style LG Android phone outed
An Optimus for pros, apparently
Why does slapping a BlackBerry-style micro Qwerty keyboard make a smartphone professional? It doesn't, but vendors continue to pitch handsets that way, the latest being LG.
To whit, the Optimus Pro, a standard Qwerty canbybar phone, all done up in black and running Android 2.3 Gingerbread. The CPU is clocked at 800MHz, and the screen is a 2.8in job, Italian-language site AndroidWorld reports.
LG, of course, hasn't outed the phone, which has a stock smartphone wireless connectivity feature set, so there's no indication when it'll go on sale. AW says it'll cost €179 (£157) Sim-free whenever it does. ®
COMMENTS
Pre 4?
This device is all I wanted from HP/(Palm). But I suppose I will have to get it from LG instead. My Nexus One has freed me from the Pre 2 sliding mechanism but at the cost of too much precision.
Voice-to-text and touch screen keyboards are no match for people's names and non-dictionary word domains; progress has been made, yes, but I think the physical keyboard still rules on these smallish devices.
Professional or not...
...£160 SIM-free will appeal to the txting kids, I think.
I love full QWERTY keyboards
I have an LG Optimus S Android phone which I like very much, except for one thing: I've come to despise the touchscreen keyboards, no matter whether in portrait of landscape orientation. I have a neurological condition called "Essential Tremor" which causes my fingers to shake a bit and I am forever hitting the wrong key (because the keys are too close together) or hitting a key multiple time resulting in mis-spelling of words. I seldom had that problem with either the Blackberry or Motorola Q I once had, simply because of the physical keys on the keyboard if there were some way of reducing the touch-screen sensitivity that might help, but neither the Froyo keyboard nor the backported Gingerbread keyboard possess this feature. I really don't give a crap if the phone is "professional" or not. If Sprint offers it in the future, I'm getting one!
Third party?
It may be worth trying out one of the third party keyboards - most of them are more forgiving than the backported Gingerbread or other stock keyboards.
fugly
I like the full keyboard, but this phone is fugly...
