MWC2009, Barcelona, 2009, LG press conference - we've been expecting that that the second largest Korean manufacturer will come up with something big, as half of Barcelona is full with KM900 Arena billboards, that was the first thing we've seen from the airplane.
The press conference started up rather hard, as we had to wait about ten-fifteen minutes, and during that time we had to watch a looping half-minute long ad with a freaking annoying music, so the press had a very mixed mood when the Korean executive, who didn't speak English very well, started reading from a sheet of paper how well his company perform last year.
Steve Ballmer has almost been with us
The guy, even in spite of his poor English, though that he just has to make a phone call, so he excused himself and initiated a video call on his watch phone and he noted that it was the first public call. To our greatest surprise he called Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's president and CEO, who had some voice delay, but than they had a nice talk for about one and a half minute.
After the great applaud Mr. Chang Ma, LG's leader of Marketing Strategy Team came on stage, but fortunately he spoke English pretty well. He talked a bit about LG having a new slogan for this year (No Longer Just and Idea) and that their new menu system, S-Class UI is very intuitive and progressive. He also brought up an example as he showed us that from now the alarm time can be set up by moving the arms of a virtual analog clock and here I've almost left the conference, as this "feature" has been part of Windows Mobile for about ten years now.
Intuitive. Fast. Funny.
After this the guy took out a KM900 (Arena), pushed in a cable and after this we have seen the phone's screen in his hand projected on a screen behind him, while on his right we have seen the image of a camera placed behind him. We were astonished: the new system is basically a mix of already existing great features, the point is that there are more main screens and we can switch between them by rotating them on a virtual cube - we've seen this before, it's called HTC TouchFLO. The main menu is very similar to the one of iPhone, but it's better, as we can scroll each row separately, and if we rotate the screen we get to see the full menu system. The great thing is that the whole thing is extermely fast and it doesn't lag. As we have seen it wasn't any slowe than Apple's menu - it's true though that iPhone has been launched about two years ago.
During the Q&A session after the conference a British journalist has asked the executives if and when they will have Android phones and LG AppStore. Fortunately he received an affirmative response: both are expected by Q3. And we are expecting them very much.
Translated by Szaszati
