LG has a phone on sale in Europe with no keypad at all, operated entirely by touching the screen with a finger, and roughly nobody is talking about it. That seems worth correcting.
The KE850 carries Prada branding, which tells you where LG thinks the value is and is also the reason it is being dismissed as a fashion exercise. That dismissal is wrong. Underneath the branding is the first phone from a major manufacturer built around a capacitive panel rather than a resistive one, and the difference between those two technologies is the entire difference between a phone you poke with a stylus and a phone you use with a thumb.
Resistive screens work by pressure. Two conductive layers with a gap, and you push one onto the other. They are cheap, they work with a fingernail or a plastic tip, and they require enough force that a light touch does nothing. That is why every Windows Mobile device ships with a stylus, and why the interfaces on those devices use small targets: with a pointed instrument you can hit a four pixel button.
Capacitive panels sense the electrical properties of a finger instead. No pressure, no stylus, and a much lighter interaction. They are also more expensive, they do not work through gloves, and they force the interface to be redesigned around targets the size of a fingertip. That last constraint is the one that matters, because it means you cannot simply shrink a desktop interface and ship it.
So LG has shipped the hardware answer to the problem I have been complaining about for months, months before Apple ships its version, and the industry has filed it under handbag accessory. I do not entirely blame them, because LG has done the difficult part and then stopped. The software on this phone is a menu system with larger buttons. There is no rethinking of what an interface should be when the whole front of the device is the input, no gesture vocabulary, no scrolling that behaves like a physical object. LG built the canvas and painted the same picture on it.
That is the recurring LG story and the Shine and Chocolate before it tell the same one. This is a company with genuine industrial design capability and no software ambition whatsoever, competing in a category that is quietly turning into a software business. The phones look superb in a shop and feel ordinary in a hand after a week.
Which puts LG in almost exactly the position I described Motorola being in, with the same underlying exposure. Design leads, software follows badly or not at all, and the moment the basis of competition shifts from how a phone looks to what it does, there is nothing to fall back on.
Buy it if you want the most striking phone available and you mostly make calls, which is genuinely most people. Just be aware that the interesting thing about this device is a component decision, and that LG appears not to have noticed which part of its own product is the important one.