10/12/2007, 1:55pm, EDT

Friday, October 12th

AT&T to offer LG iPhone rival

AT&T is poised to launch a second full touchscreen phone that will compete with the iPhone, says a source leaking photos of the device to Gizmodo. The American carrier is expected to receive the CU920, a close relative of the Prada and KU990 available so far only in Europe; like either predecessor, the phone will be dominated by a touchscreen and have little more than call and answer buttons on the front. However, the CU920 will have support for American-standard 3G over HSDPA, the insider claims -- potentially giving the LG device an advantage over the iPhone, which uses the slower EDGE protocol.

More important may be its web browsing technology, according to the tipster. The CU920 will run Mozilla's upcoming mobile Firefox browser and, like mobile Safari, will render pages as they would on a desktop copy. Viewers would zoom in to view page elements without disrupting the layout of the page but would have to take two steps versus the iPhone's single pinch motion, says the report. Other software enhancements are known to include an instant messaging client and may also involve picture or video messaging, either of which has been omitted from the iPhone's early software.

A release date, price, and other launch information have not been provided for the touch phone, though the existence of AT&T branding and working software suggests a release within the next few months.

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njfuzzy

Mock, then copy...

-2

10/12, 2:09pm, EDT

I think it is interesting. When the iPhone was announced, all of the big players downplayed the potential success of the iPhone, mostly by suggesting the very form-factor-- dominated by a touch screen, no keyboard-- would be a bad idea. Yet they are now all releasing such devices. It's called vindication.

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wonderllama

imitation...

10/12, 2:41pm, EDT

...is the highest form of flattery. Or so they say. I doubt, however, that we will see the barrage of lawsuits and doom-and-gloom reports levied against LG that we see Apple dealing with. I suppose consumer litigation is directly proportionate to the visibility of the targeted company.

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Constable Odo

copycats is more like it

-1

10/12, 3:53pm, EDT

Always looking down their noses when something new comes along and when it does well, they jump right on the bandwagon saying "I was just about to do that or we had that on the design board years ago." They can kiss my butt. LG will get away cleanly with no lawsuits. It's Apple that they hate, not the idea of a locked phone to a carrier.

One more thing. I thought handset manufacturers said that virtual keyboards suck to high heaven. No company would be stupid enough to follow Apple down that road. No, they'll just say they did a better job an their virtual keyboards are 10x better than the iPhone.

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Constable Odo

iPhone 2.0 redux

-1

10/12, 4:08pm, EDT

When it comes out early next year it should stomp the hell out of all these copycat vendors running some rinky-dink WinMobile 6 OS compared to Leopard OS. They can fight it out hardware feature for hardware feature, but absolutely nobody has Leopard except Apple. Those other systems will probably slow down, upchuck and crash under heavy usage. What? A whole 25 MB of system memory. Wow! Heavy duty.

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UberFu

is big problem !!

10/12, 4:21pm, EDT

Mozilla recently stated they are working on a Web version of FireFox in conjunction with whatever "phone tech" Google is brewing and that neither of these will be ready for release before 2008 and are at least a year away [at least Firefox Mobile is]_

So in the next few months [2008] - maybe the LG phone hits the streets - but it ain't gonna have Mozilla's official Firefox Mobile version on it until later in the year_

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ZinkDifferent

because LG...

10/12, 5:26pm, EDT

...is so well known for the excellence in interface design....

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kevrev

Leopard on iPhone

10/12, 9:08pm, EDT

I want Leopard on my iPhone so I can call up Time Machine and go back to before I made that drunken phone call I really shouldn't have. That would be a killer feature!

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