The first time you look at the LG Prada II, the second version of the mobile phone collaboration between the Italian fashion label and the Korean phone manufacturer, you can't help feeling a sense of disappointment. It looks almost identical to the first-generation Prada launched last year, except that it's about 5mm thicker and about 50% heavier at 130g.
When you get past that, and actually get your hands on the product, you realise that it has a plethora of new features: the slide-out QWERTY keyboard (which accounts for the weight and thickness), an ultra-user-friendly menu display and (thank god) Wi-Fi enabled internet browsing. And for an extra £250, you can pick up a sleek Bluetooth watch accessory, which had this writer in raptures.
The logic behind the new Prada is: let's keep the old design, because it sold a massive 100m units, but let's give the user a lot more functionality.
As one marketing executive explained, Prada I customers bought the product to show it off, and kept another phone hidden away for actual use. With Prada II, the idea is that you can show it off AND send and receive emails and browse the net comfortably.
With this launch, the company has thrown down the gauntlet to other touchscreen phones such as Blackberry's Storm and Apple's iPhone, and the trio will do battle over the Christmas period alongside T-Mobile's G1 and Nokia's Xpress Music.
Prada II is priced at €600 in the eurozone, the same as the first phone when it hit the shelves – it's not really the fault of the company that the weak pound means it's a lot more expensive in the UK this year, at about £500. Since the phone is SIM-free, the price also depends on the provider you get the phone with.
The watch accessory retails at €300 (£252). Expensive, but a beautiful product. You can use the watch to cancel calls, read text messages and put your phone on silent mode, which is perfect for cutting off your mum when she insists on ringing while you're in a board meeting. In fact, one of the company representatives gleefully gave a demonstration when his phone rang while he was answering journalists' questions.
As he put it later, €300 is expensive for a watch accessory, but pretty decent value for a Prada watch. In a neat marketing gimmick, the first batch of customers – the company hasn't revealed how many – will get the watch for free.
If you decide that's not too much money, what you get in return is one of the most elegant phones on the market. The menu display, while not as pleasing to the eye, is certainly as convenient to use as the iPhone.
Different menus are easily navigated through the touchscreen facility, and you can create your own set of shortcuts by placing your finger on the relevant option – such as messages – and dragging it onto the main screen. Once you've clicked and dragged all the shortcuts you want onto the screen, you give the phone a little shake, and they arrange themselves in neat columns and rows.
The touchscreen is as intelligent as the first Prada, with the added feature that the phone vibrates slightly each time you press a number, which is pointless but quite cool.
The internet browsing on this phone is far ahead of that on the first Prada. The interface is fairly easy to use, and unlike the first phone browsing is Wi-Fi enabled. On the company's own HSDPA network, it can go up to 7.2MB per second.
The 5-megapixel camera is ahead of the competition in the same space, with a Schneider-Kreuznach certified lens, and the phone incorporates slow-motion video recording and plays videos in the DivX format. It also plays the standard music formats and has an 8GB external memory slot.
It's a really good product, but the problem is you'll have to pointedly slide out the QWERTY keyboard to differentiate it from the earlier phone. Size and weight are a problem as well, but the main issue is that it could alienate the wag market that made the first product so successful.
Will businesspeople be impressed enough to choose it over the Blackberry Storm, and be prepared to shell out £500? Only time will tell if Prada II will be seen as a brilliant all-in-one product, or a phone with a bit of an identity crisis.