Microsoft has yet to announce when the new Windows Phone 7 OS will finally be launched, but it looks like they already have their first smart phone ready: the LG Panther. This handset already appeared early in March –right after the WP7 Series was announced. Now, several months (and a name change) later, the new MS mobile platform has finally appeared running on a commercial model (no word yet if the Acer demo device shown in the Microsoft presentations was a commercial design mobile phone).
As seen in the images, the Panther comes with a slide out QWERTY keyboard and a large WVGA capacitive touch screen. While LG has yet to tell us how big this screen is; initial estimates place it at 4 inches diagonally. Spec wise, the phone will be following Microsoft’s preset requirement for the new OS, which means that we can expect a 5 mega pixel camera, GPS, WiFi, an accelerometer, Bluetooth and the usual smart phone extras.
The CPU will no doubt be a Qualcomm chip, and we are hoping that it will be the newly announced Snapdragon-A that runs at 1.3 GHz (like the one used by the upcoming Mondrian by Taiwanese manufacturer HTC).
Of course, the new phone will have all of the WP7’s announced features. This means that user will get to enjoy all new 3D game apps running on Microsoft’s XNA system and will be able to log and track their in-game achievements via the Xbox Live Games service. Media fans will certainly enjoy the Silverlight support and access to the new MSN player.
Microsoft Office will also be present in the device, brining much needed enterprise functionality to the otherwise social-networking centric operating system. With no specific launch date having set, we can only wait for this amazing device to finally hit store shelves.
Tags: Bing, LG, LG-Panther, Live, Windows-Phone-7, XNA