LG Launches Barebones Android Phone

LG today announced its first Android phone, the awkwardly named GW620. The device looks sharp, almost HTC Touch Pro 2-ish, with a 3-inch full touch screen, large slide-out QWERTY keyboard, and bonus features like a 3.5mm headphone jack. But LG didn’t add much flavor to the phone. While Motorola and HTC have created custom Android user interfaces like MotoBlur and HTC Sense that tightly integrate with social networks and offer a robust offering of widgets and unique features, LG doesn’t appear to have tweaked Google’s operating system at all. For now it’s just going to be launched into some European markets later this year, so we hope LG innovates a bit more on the software side before it plans a U.S. date for a similar device.