On April 27 yesterday, at a launching ceremony in Italy, LG announced the LG-U900 cell phone. This is the world’s first commercially available UMTS (WCDMA) DVB-H mobile handsets. The company plan to release the phone to the Italian market on early May – near the 2006 FIFA World Cup event – through Hutchison, a leading global telecommunications services provider. Once it established a good base in that country, Hutchison will start to offer LG-U900 to the world-wide customers.

The cell phone itself features a 2.2-inch wide screen LCD display that will be quite handy for watching digital TV broadcast. This triband (800/1800/1900) GSM phone is also equipped with a 1.3 megapixel camera module, MP3 player, Bluetooth connectivity, 58MB of internal memory with TransFlash card slot for additional storage, up to three hours of TV ‘playback’ with TV-out port, and several premium digital broadcasting functions such as ESG (Electronics Service Guide) and CAS (Conditional Access System).

The UMTS (WCDMA) DVB-H technology evolved from DVB-T, European terrestrial digital broadcast technology, becoming the European mobile broadcast standard. It provides high-speed data transmission, a variety of channels, a high-resolution screen and strong mobile broadcasting.

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