At the beginning of this month, rumors indicated that LG was planning to release a new smartphone on the market, a true follower of the older KS200 model. The rumors were based on some info leaked from the FCC website, that said a new device called KS500 was to be launched in the near future. Knowing that LG tags its smartphones with the KS codename, we thought that the FCC-revealed handset could be an Android, Symbian or even Windows Mobile-based one.

New pieces of information surfaced the Internet these days and show that we were wrong, as the new KS500 slider, sadly, doesn't feature any operating system. Instead, it has received an optical touchpad, GPS and a 3 Megapixel camera. Design is pretty common for all the latest LG sliders, so there is no way it will stand out from the crowd. The 3 Megapixel camera with fixed focus it's also no innovation, especially after the wide range of 8 Megapixel camera phones announced for this year.

Its measures (102.8 x 49.2 x 14.9 mm) aren't impressive either, so the main attraction of the device will be the optical touchpad. It seems that the latter can be turned off for menu navigation, but can be kept on when browsing the Internet. Other features of the phone include: a TFT QVGA display supporting 262K colors, 100 MB internal memory and support for 8GB microSD memory card, GPS with A-GPS support, Bluetooth and HSDPA (3.6Mbps) connectivities. Google Maps have been replaced with Yahoo! Go maps and localization services that will work with the built-in GPS receiver.

The tri-band (GSM 900 / 1800 / 1900) slider has no price tag yet, but judging by the way it looks and the specs it features, it should be cheap. There's no information available about its official launching date either, but pictures show that it will sell through Vodafone.