Korea’s Pantech launches dual-LCD sliding phone

Pantech Group, the leading Korean handset manufacturer, has launched the IM-R200 handset, the latest dual-LCD sliding phone weighing just 104gr equipped with an OLED touch-sensitive screen.

Separated from its main LCD display, the new phone does away with the standard keypad in favor of a brand-new LCD-typed keypad. When sliding up, the virtual keypad shows up on the LCD that is touch-sensitive, allowing users to dial numbers and view contacts with a stroke of a finger.

Chang Jin Park, Head of the Domestic Marketing Division, Pantech Group, said, “by incorporating the touch screen keypad into a sliding form factor, the IM-R200 will help customers to embrace the touch screen as one of the major input technologies, while providing novel fun of using the touch-sensitive keypad.”

Its touch keypad offers a fun and easy way to use its multimedia applications with separate and virtual interfaces for each function. For example, the touch sensitive LCD displays various lists of songs when the phone is used as a music player, while it shows camera functions when used as a camera.

The capacitive touch screen of the IM-R200 vibrates when pressed, to give the feel of a real buttons, sporting enhanced and unique sense of the entire phone.

The dual camera – a 2 mega-pixel camera and a VGA camera – mounted on the IM-R200 features face recognition function; it can recognize the shape of a face and automatically adjust it for the best look when shooting.

Other highlights include a 2.0-inch QVGA LCD with 260,000 colors for main display, a 1.6-inch OLED LCD with 260,000 colors for its keypad and 128 polyphonic ringtones. Also it has document viewer functionality, enabling users to scroll through the documents.

The IM-R200 will be launched in Korea this month under the SKY brand and will be supplied to SK Telecom and KTF, two of the top three wireless operators in Korea.