LG GD900 Comes at CTIA with Transparent Keyboard

April 1 means for a lot of people the day when CTIA (Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association) Wireless 2009 show kicks off in Las Vegas. And while a lot of companies are expected to surprise us on that date, some have already started to announce some of the goodies that we are to see there, and Korean mobile phone maker LG Electronics is one of them.

The LG GD900 has already been showcased at the mobile World Congress show in Barcelona, Spain last month, and the company plans to show us some more of it in Las Vegas this week. The new 13.4mm-thick handset comes with a sliding form factor, 7.2Mbps HSDPA, a 3-inch display and LG's new S-Class UI, as well as the first functional transparent glass keypad in the world.

Among the other capabilities of the upcoming device, we can also count vibrational haptic feedback for the transparent keypad and the handset is also reported to come with touchscreen capabilities that would actually work like some sort of a touch-sensitive mouse pad when browsing over the Web or navigating within the UI. It is said to support gestures such as writing an “M” to launch the MP3 music player, and multi-touch capabilities like pinch to zoom on photographs.

Another gesture that the new LG GD900 with transparent keypad and touch capabilities provides support for is the control of the volume through the simple drawing of a circle. According to the Korean phone maker, the new mobile device is expected to be launched on the European and Asian markets sometime in May. For the time being, there are no details regarding the phone's availability in the United States as well, but we expect to learn more at CTIA, where some info on the price tag the device should feature might also become available.