We finally got our hands on the LG GD900 Crystal, which is billed as the world's first transparent-design phone, and the transparent screen is as cool as we hoped--and not half as pointless.
The GD900 Crystal is a slider phone with a 3-inch touch screen, and a transparent keypad that lights up when opened. But it's more than just gimmicky, see-through goodness--the keypad is a touch-sensitive controller, too. That means you can use it to move through menus, navigate the Web, and even write using handwriting recognition.
LG has thrown in gesture support too, so you can launch applications with a swipe around the keypad. This includes multitouch, as does the main display, so you can pinch your fingers to zoom in to a photo or map.
If this is a touch-happy overload, you can also use it normally, to dial phone calls, and there's vibrating feedback to let you know when you've hit the flat numbers.
So what's the point of having two touch screens? The reasoning goes that if you're basking in the glory of the GD900's screen--watching a video, for example--you don't want to block the action by waving your sausage fingers over the screen to zoom or rewind. And it's pretty freaking cool, too.
The GD900 uses the same S-class user interface we've seen on the LG Arena. One of our biggest complaints about the Arena was that the touch screen wasn't as responsive as we'd like, but based on the phones we tried, it's running with more vim and vigor on the GD900. The little spinning cube is still useless, but there are about five different ways to access each feature, and adding gestures means there should be a user-interface option for every user, if they can be bothered to learn them all. … Read more
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