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Loading ...Vanity, thy name is LG Shine
So, off to trendy downtown T.O. hotspot Lobby (corporate slogan: “No, you can’t come in dressed like that”) for the announcement of the new lineup of cell phones from Rogers for the holiday season. It’s a rough life, this being forced to eat Kobe beef sliders and wash ‘em down with raspberry mojitos, but someone’s gotta do it.
Three categories on offer, here: First up, new MP3-oriented phones the Sony Ericsson W580i and the Samsung A516. Unremarkable, except that MicroSD memory card storage is on a forever upward trend; these phones are compatible with cards up to 8GB. The Samsung has a feature that allows you to shake the phone to change songs, and you needn’t flip it open to use the media player — there’s transport buttons on the surface. I got completely lost in the navigation, though, and that was only one mojito into the evening.
Rogers also launched HTC’s Touch iPhone wannabe, a couple weeks after Telus had done the same.
In Category 3, though, things got interesting: Two offerings with video-calling features. The clamshell MotoRAZR 2 is two millimetres thinner than previous incarnations. But the star, in terms of just drop-dead gorgeous looks, was LG’s Shine slider phone, a little stainless steel number whose screen, in dark mode, turns mirror-silver, turning the device into a sleek metal bar. It’s reflective enough for quick touch-ups — that stray eyebrow hair that’s always going awry and omigod is that a white hair in my goatee?
As for the video calling … the demo station hooked me up with a colleague in another room by videophone. Or at least I think so — the room was loud. Visually, it was a Webcam-quality conversation with noticeable but not terrible lag. Your image appears in the lower right corner of the screen. And a warning’s in order, as old habits die hard: Since I couldn’t properly hear my interlocutor, at one point I reflexively brought the phone to the side of my head, giving her far too intimate an introduction to my ear canal.
It ain’t a unified communications suite by any stretch, but the lag is liveable. I’m hoping there’s the option of answering video calls as voice calls for those seven a.m. interuptions when you still have bleary eyes, toothpaste on your chin and hair that’s breaking new ground in terms of geometry. (No longer my problem, actually.) I am reaching a little for the applications, but give consumers a technology for a couple years, and they tend to find the application themselves.
