At its heart, the LG KE850 PRADA is a tri-band GSM phone with GPRS and EDGE, there’s a large 240×400 pixel touch-sensitive display that can playback widescreen video clips, Bluetooth 2.0, microSD expandable memory, and the KE850 has an FM radio and a two megapixel camera. We measure the display as being 3.2 inches diagonally, a little smaller than the iPhone’s 3.5 inches. Bearing an uncanny resemblance to the Apple iPhone, the LG KE850 designed in conjunction with PRADA is an advanced touchscreen-only phone with sleekly understated looks.

The unique feature of the KG920 is the camera – it’s a 5 megapixel camera phone, which would make it the highest resolution camera phone when it is launched in Germany in the summer.

The KG920 looks exactly like a digital camera from the back. From the front it does look a little strange, but all the usual buttons are somewhere. The 5 megapixel camera has autofocus and a strobe flash, but no optical zoom. It can take VGA quality video clips though (at 30 fps), and save everything onto miniSD cards, although internal memory is a pretty decent 128Mb.

The first thing to note is that UMTS in the US is not the same as UMTS everywhere else in the world – it’s an 850/1900 MHz UMTS device rather than the UMTS 2100 MHz standard that pretty much everyone else uses. It does have quad-band GSM and EDGE support though, so you can still continue to use the LG CU500 more-or-less anywhere in the world.

The LG L343i is a budget i-mode phone, and don’t to be confused with the similarly named NEC 343i, this LG model is designed to give low-cost access to i-mode features in a lightweight package.

The LG L343i weighs just 86 grams – a lightweight phone – but it’s pretty much a standard clamshell device when it comes to size. It’s also a fairly smart looking phone, with an understated “squared off” design.

LG VX-8600 CDMA phone combines most of the features of the 8500 Chocolate with an ultra-thin clamshell form factor. Key features include touch-sensitive external music keys, a music player, memory card slot, stereo Bluetooth, EVDO high-speed data, and speaker-independent voice control.

The VX8600 keypad will not have the “chocolate-styled” keys in two shades of gray but an ordinary flat keypad; also the D-pad is not circle one, but in a rectangular form. On the outside, it seems that the VX-8600 will have a bigger external display than the one used in KG810 and we are not sure if it will feature “the Chocolate” touch keys, dedicated to the music player.

The LG U830 is a completely different proposition, because the technology is probably even more interesting than the looks. It’s not just a 3G phone, the LG U830 is an HSDPA device – this means that it has access to 3’s 3.5G data network (where available). There’s a whopping 180Mb of internal memory (although it doesn’t seem to be expandable), a 2 megapixel main camera with a subcamera for video calling, a large 2.2″ 240×320 pixel display, a multimedia player and stereo Bluetooth. There’s an email client and web browser too.

The LG KU800 is a 3G version of the LG “Chocolate” KG800 phone, which should be available from Vodafone (pictured) and some other operators by Christmas 2006.

It’s a great looking phone, and of course the original LG Chocolate was one of the most attractive phones of 2006. The most serious flaw with the Chocolate was the way that the heat-sensitive keys were just TOO sensitive and would activate accidentally. We don’t know if LG have fixed this in the KU800, but our advice would be to back up your address book to a PC on a regular basis.

The LG-SV420 is part of LG’s “Black Label” range, which includes the LG Chocolate, although there are many different “Chocolate” handsets in different markets. So, this Korean CDMA version of the LG Shine is called the LG-SV420, but any derivative for worldwide markets would be slightly different.