LG today announced the Optimus Pro and Net, two new mid-range Android devices, as the company continues to bank on Google's mobile OS to turn around its sluggish smartphone business.
The Optimus Pro runs on Android 2.3 Gingerbread and features a full QWERTY keyboard in a portrait-style form factor, with a 2.8-inch and 800-megahertz processor. It has 150-megabytes of storage and is outfitted with a 3-megapixel camera and support for Wi-Fi. The Pro will ship in white, black, and titan.
It joins a recent wave of smartphones featuring a BlackBerry-like design, such as the Droid Pro and the HTC ChaCha. These may aim for BlackBerry users nervous about Research in Motion's flagging fortunes and looking for a similar device elsewhere.
LG's other recently announced release, the Optimus Net, features a 3.2-inch display, 800-megahertz processor, 150-megabytes of storage and a 3-megapixel camera. Some markets will find the Net supporting NFC capability and QWERTY keyboards, while Brazil, China and Asian markets will also support dual SIM cards. The Net will be available in black or white.
With the Net, LG aims for the social networking crowd, combining popular social networking services in one convenient widget on the home screen. With the widget, users can multitask between updating their status on Facebook and Twitter while reading their friends' social media feeds on the same screen. The widget also integrates one-click photo sharing with multiple social media accounts from the home screen.
The phones continue LG's deepening push into Android smartphones, which the company is leaning on to help turn around its fortunes in the mobile market. Slow to realize the rise of smartphones, LG is now following phone makers like Motorola and HTC into the Android sector, piggybacking on the platform's popularity.
These latest two models may help LG find an audience among first-time and newer smartphone buyers, but with their middling processor power and relatively small screens, the company has yet to really compete in the higher-end of the market, dominated by HTC and Motorola.
Both handsets are expected to hit 30 markets across Europe this summer, and will be shipped worldwide later this year. The company has not yet released carrier or price information in the U.S.
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