LG gets me all hot and bothered when they release a great piece of hardware and fail to make it as functional as it looks. The LG9800 is a consumer oriented phone aimed at Verizon’s V-Cast service. When flipped open a second screen, stereo speakers, and a full QWERTY keyboard are revealed. Behind the QWERTY keyboard there is a 1.3MP camera - a more and more common feature on multimedia phones these days. The thing looks beautiful, but unfortunately will not be a smartphone, and has a 4:3 aspect ratio. This means that it will be neither an email workhorse, or good for viewing movies brought along on a storage card. Now I’ll admit that the idea of using EV-DO to stream movies to my phone is kind of cool, but I’m doubting they will be able to get enough quality out of it to really replace the coming generation of portable video players. The LG9800 looks like it might find a niche in the SMS/chat crazed teen market, but without a higher resolution screen or business oriented operating system I just can’t see this catching on in face of phones like the Motorola Q.

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