LG must have felt a little cheated at its CES Vegas press conference this morning, what with its main announcement – an alliance with Skype to bring phone calls to your living room – having been pipped to the post by a Panasonic announcement of the same deal yesterday.
Nevertheless, LG put on a brave and stoic face and managed to pull a few more gadgets out of its flat screened hat to wow the crowds, just hours before its main rivals will release their comparable offerings.
If LG sets the trend, then it would appear this year’s couch potato fashionable must-haves are all about thinner screens, OLED screens, 3D TV and bringing the internet into the living room.
And in terms of waifs, LG was really keeping it wafer thin, with an Infinia-branded ultra slim LED backlit TV just 6.9mm thick. The firm reckons its latest offering isn’t just super thin, it also boasts the deepest of blacks one could possibly wish for in a telly, with no less than 240 zones of local dimming.
Also, on all screens 32 inches or wider, LG says it will be bunging in wireless options allowing punters to stream films from Netflix directly to their TV or, if that doesn’t excite, widgets like Accuweather – to help you know you’re snowed in even if you can’t be bothered to get off the couch and check for yourself.
For those who don’t want to buy a new display in order to get the wonderous benefits of the interwibble whilst watching Star-Trek, LG says it is also flogging USB Wi-Fi dongles for several of its newer TVs, so users can hook up to the net wirelessly. So long Ethernet jack!
In terms of 3D, LG said it would be providing all its 47 and 55-inch offerings with 3-D realm technology and also said a 3D Blu-ray player was in the pipeline.
In terms of ye old run-of-the-mill Blu-ray, LG said it also had a new twist on the old favourite, with the BD590 which includes an in-built hard drive for media storage.
The firm also announced it would be coming out with a diminutive 15-inch ultra-thin OLED-screen TV within the next six months, but didn’t say how much it would cost. It ain’t likely to come cheap though, with the only comparable screen – an 11 inch from Sony – costing a whopping $2,500.
Finally, LG ended by reminding the audience it did actually sell other things apart from TVs, showing off its new smart phone, the Expo, which comes complete with a pico projector for beaming films and pictures onto walls.
Sexting teens beware, however, because the new projector phone is apparently not to be used for beaming lewd photos of your partner’s bottom onto school locker-room walls, according to LG which spent several minutes showing off ads from its James Lipton anti sexting campaign.
Have a ponder about that.
