LG launched their new Chocolate BL40 widescreen phone last night at a swanky party in the London Design Museum. I was lucky enough to get some time with the BL40 and as you’d expect it excels at displaying video on its 4” 21:9 aspect ratio screen.

The Chocolate uses an updated version of the “S Class” interface used on many of the recent LG phones. The rotating cube has been stretched and now mimics the applications and shortcuts setup on the phone. The interface is noticeably quicker than earlier LG phones such as the Arena I reviewed earlier in the year. This is no mean feat as the Arena is no slouch.

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A surprise announcement at the Mobile World Congress back in February was the GD-910 Watchphone from LG. Imagined in the 1960’s, the watchphone is one of those cinematic gadgets that’s never materialised in the real world – until now anyway.

The specification sheet is impressive for something so small – you get a 3G videophone, MP3 player, voice dialling and a text-so-speech function to read incoming texts.

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We first saw a practical demonstration of wireless gadget charging at CES 2008 but it was still a concept product back then. WildCharge have since put the idea into production and Firebox are now selling the WildCharge pad for £49.99.

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Acording to this article in Mobile magazine, Amazon are close to launching Kindle in the UK – the hope is to have it here this side of Christmas.

Launching the Kindle over here isn’t just a matter of shipping the hardware – the thing that differentiates Kindle from other ebook readers is its ability to download books and newspaper content automatically using a mobile phone network. For that to work, Amazon need to get into bed with a network provider so that users don’t need to fork out for their own separate contract.

It’s a really cool idea in theory – the idea of waking up to have your customised news headlines already on your kindle ready for you to read on the way to work is very appealing.

Before you get too excited though, you might want to read this CNET story about how much control they have over your content – the irony is almost too much to bear.

LG are ramping up marketing on the S-class user interface first seen this year on the KM 900 Arena. If you don’t have the phone you can play with the interface on the dedicated site they’ve set up to showcase it.

Downloading a desktop widget from the site also gets you entered into a draw to win the phone – they’re giving away one a day until 4 August!

Head on over to http://sclassui.lgmobile.com to check it out.

Some of us can remember the original Sony Walkman – a revolution in it’s day but the world has moved on since then and Sony were slow to jump on the MP3 bandwagon, letting a certain Cupertino based company steal the show.

The “Walkman” brand has been used on various devices since then (most commonly phones) but the new X series marks Sony’s most recent attempt to get back into the portable music player business. Read on to see what we think…

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I’m not planning on paying the price of entry to the iPhone users club any time soon, but that does leave me with a problem: Mobile IE on WinMo 6.0 is pretty far behind the times.

The latest version of Opera Mobile should sort that out though – 9.7 for Windows Mobile phones includes a new rendering engine and Opera Turbo compression technology to speed up surfing speeds on slow networks. Plus you get a decent full page browsing experience and tabs.

Download the beta at http://www.opera.com/mobile/download/

Samsung are running the “Samsung Unpacked” competition to win their latest mobile phone plus $5000 in cash.

What’s the phone spec? We have no idea – that’s under wraps for now. Smartphone? Multimedia phone? The Unpacked website promises more information this Friday so we won’t have to wait too long to find out.

To be in with a chance of winning the phone and cash, go to www.samsungunpacked.com – but the competition is only open until June 3rd so get your skates on!

On Sunday MobileCrunch posted details of a possible new Nokia smartphone and yesterday CellPassion added the photo.

Today TrustedReviews ran the story, so in the grand tradition of chasing internet rumours around the blogosphere we now present it to you!

Short version: This could be the Next Big Thing(tm) from Nokia. Codenamed “Rover” (huh?) it’s a smartphone / internet tablet with the following specs:

• 5MP camera with Carl Zeiss lens
• 800×480 screen
• GPS
• Accelerometer (rapidly becoming obligatory in new phones)
• HSDPA

As regular readers will know I picked up an Arena at an LG event 5 weeks ago. First impressions were good but I promised to write a full review when I’d spent some time with the phone. I’ve used the Arena in place of my Sony Ericsson W980 and now it’s time to tell you what I think of it. This is one feature packed phone and so I’ll limit myself to talking about the highs and lows of the phone rather than get bogged down in too much detail. The full specification and feature list can be found here.

Touch screen and User Interface

The S-Class User Interface is one of the Arena’s major selling points but is it any good? LG have done a great job with the touch screen UI and it’s almost as precise and responsive as the iPod Touch which is high praise indeed. Yes the rotating cube is a bit gimmicky but it does at least give easy access to the four shortcut screens and can also be used to impress you mates down the pub.

The screen is bright and clear but in common with most colour screens it can be difficult to use in bright sunlight. Touch the status bar at the top of the phone screen and a neat shortcut menu drops down giving instant access to: Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Alarm, Music Player, Calendar items and Phone Profile functions.

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