LG has a couple of new Shine cellphones for the consumers, and this time the Shine comes in a shade of gold while the other will be a CDMA version. What is it with gadgets and the color gold? It looks as though there won’t be any changes in the feature set to accompany the new coat of paint. Is it me, or is this an omen urging us to start buying gold as a safe haven for our finances in view of the less-than-stellar economy? Those who want to collect gold items will have to import one as there is no word on the gold Shine making its way Stateside.

LG missed the boat with the recent 3GSM show. This phone, from LG doesn’t have 3G capability. Shocking considering the LG movement recently. What it does have is EDGE, and a 3″ 256k color screen. MicroSD is the memory of choice, and with LG recently internal speakers are good quality. Bluetooth, Camera, and radio included. It doesn’t support some GSM, so if you want it, you’ll have to order it through LG yourself.

Now here comes a global-roaming phone from LG - LG has just announced the LC-3200 handset in Korea that is capable of handling different CDMA frequencies. To the layman, this means you can tote the LC-3200 around Asia without fear of incompatibility. Features include a 1.3-megapixel camera, an integrated MP3 player, and an electronic dictionary amongst others.

This global roaming phone is a dual-band type that supports both 1800MHz band used by LG Telecom and 800MHz, a frequency band used by countries in Asia-Pacific region. This phone will provide automatic roaming service in a total of 7 countries including China, Taiwan, Guam, Saipan.

Especially, using ‘LCD slide-up design,’ applied in this model, users can slide up the LCD when talking over the phone and they don’t need to slide up the LCD when checking text message, searching for phone numbers and others. Furthermore, 5 sports games are mounted which include golf, baseball, fishing, bowling, and soccer.

Source: Ubergizmo

Everyone knows the success of the iPod. The external interface attracted a lot of people to purchase, and for good reason. The LG Chocolate looks iPod inspired. If your looking for an MP3 player that can make phone calls, look elsewhere. If you have a commute, and just need something to entertain you on the way this is the phone for you.

This phone is loud. Visually and audibly loud in every way you can imagine. Audibly, the phone makes you seem like your getting yelled at. You’ll find yourself turning the sound down on it a lot. To counterbalance that, you’d imagine there would be a speaker phone to play your MP3’s and to make calls. No, there is no speaker phone function. That seems odd to me, that it will ring MP3’s, but not have a speaker phone.

The Navi-key is very touchy, excuse the pun. Walking will cause you to occasionally activate the wrong option, which seems minor. If you buy a cellphone, you probably do walk and talk, walk and access your phone. You’ll find yourself using the number pad more, and they are small but much more useful than the Navi-pad.

The phone has Bluetooth headset capability, which is a bonus. However, you can’t transfer music via Bluetooth which can be a turn off. They advise you to purchase an SD card and load all your songs on it, then slip it into your phone. You’ll still have to format the card, and the best way to do that is to buy a song off of Vcast. Kind of defeats the purpose. The dead shocker is the battery life. For everything I described, you’d imagine it’d get poor battery time. It’s very above average for all the functioning. If you don’t use it to play songs, you will really only need to charge the phone once a week. You can also play a couple hours music before a recharge is needed. If you are a heavy call/text/music person, you’ll get about 2 to 3 days between charges.

This phone won’t blow anyone away, and the difficulty of loading songs was a turn off to me. For a novelty, it’s a decent phone because of the manageable price tag. The whole situation will remind you a lot of the RAZR. The fanfare is there, the colors are there, but for the novelty do you really want to be stuck with this phone for at least a year? I’d be inclined to say no.