Jan 11, 2011 11:24 GMT  ·  By

Canadian carrier Telus has just dropped LG Optimus 7's price, which is now available for purchase for only $49.99 with a new 3-year contract.

The carrier's move shouldn't surprise anyone, as Amazon is now offering several Windows Phone 7 smartphones for only $0.01 with the same contract deal.

Telus is also offering the HTC Surround 7 with Windows Phone 7, but this is a bit more expensive than the Optimus 7: it can be purchased for $99.99 with a new 3-year contract.

It seems that Windows Phone 7 devices have become the cheapest smartphones offered by major carriers and retailers in North America.

The Optimus 7 is the first Windows Phone 7 smartphone released by LG and it was made available for purchase in November 2010.

The device is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD8650 1 GHz processor and runs on Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 mobile platform, which is expected to be updated soon.

It comes with a generous 3.8-inch TFT capacitive touchscreen with 16 million colors and 480 x 800 pixels resolution. The handset embeds multi-touch input method, accelerometer sensor for UI auto-rotate, as well as proximity sensor for auto turn-off of the screen.

LG Optimus 7 sports a 5-megapixel camera with autofocus, LED flash, geo-tagging and video recording capabilities (720p@24fps).

When it comes to connectivity, the Optimus 7 is an all-rounder as it features HSDPA 7.2 Mbps, HSUPA 5.76 Mbps, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n connectivity, DLNA function, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP support, GPRS and EDGE class 10, as well as GPS with A-GPS support (Bing maps).

The smartphone packs 16GB storage space, 512 MB RAM and 512 MB ROM. It lacks a microSD card slot for memory expansion, as WP7 does not feature a storage mode.

The standard Li-Ion 1500 mAh battery is rated by the manufacturer for up to 330 hours of standby time or up to 6 hours 40 minutes (up to 5 hours 3G) of talk time.

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Telus price offer for LG Optimus 7
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