LG GD900 Crystal – A Transparent Touch-screen phone.

The first transparent unique keypad phone is out. 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 unexpectedly quiet feature-full.

The GD900 Crystal is a slider phone and features a 3-inch touch screen, with a hyped transparent keypad that lights up when opened. The keypad is a touch-sensitive controller which 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. It looked to me like iPhone/iPod controls. 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.
Photos: Looking through the LG GD900 Crystal

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.
We found gestures and handwriting recognition were accurate and responsive, and although we wouldn’t use it for long texts, we could see handwriting coming in handy when you want to enter a few words in a Web form without fiddling with predictive text on the alphanumeric keypad. Like the Arena, the transparent handset is no slouch when it comes to features. There’s also an 8-megapixel camera, expandable memory up to 32GB, Wi-Fi, and HSDPA for speedy Web surfing.
It’s not sure whether the phone will ship with a tempered glass keypad or a hard plastic one, we’re rooting for glass, although the plastic version we saw looked fine but either way, we’re looking forward to looking at stuff through it.
The see-though wonder will be available starting July for UK. It’s not yet available with any U.S. carriers, but consumers in the States should be able to buy it unlocked.

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