Are you tired of taking your phone out of your pocket just so that you can check up on your Twitter stream or skip to the next music track? Sony Ericsson thinks you are and that’s why they’ve announced the new LiveView gadget. It’s about the size of a watch face and it comes with a wrist strap. You can kind of figure out where they think you should put it, right?

Basically, the Sony Ericsson LiveView is a Bluetooth external cell phone screen that pushes most of the functionality from your phone onto its 1.3-inch OLED display. You can read RSS, check Facebook, and do whatever else without ever taking your phone out of your pocket. If you’re not the wrist watch type, it can also be clipped onto your clothing like the new iPod nano.

For controls, it has a touch-sensitive bezel and physical buttons on the corners. I don’t think it has anything in terms of a microphone or speaker, though, so you don’t quite get the James Bond watchphone experience. Based on how watch phones have been doing these last couple of years, that might be a good thing. I think I’d still rather just use my phone as-is though.

The LiveView should be compatible with smartphones running Android 2.0+, so long as the app you’re using is designed for this interface. You’ll need the Sony Ericsson LiveWare Manager app from Android Market too. Look for it in Q4.

[Live View product page via Wired]

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The Samsung S9110 measures just 11.98mm in thickness, whereas the LG counterpart is a size or two chubbier with 13.9mm of thickness. In slimming down, however, Samsung had to make some sacrifices in other departments. For starters, the LG phone does quad-band GSM with HSDPA support, whereas the Samsung Watch Phone is only a dual-band GSM (900/1800) with nary of a mention of 3G.

That’s no the only downside to the Samsung S9110 either. This Watch Phone lacks the camera foiund on the LG alternative, and the Samsung phone only has 40MB of internal memory compared to the 2GB in the LG. Despite being thinner, the Samsung offering is slightly heavier (91g vs. 84g) too.

There are two very notable advantages for the Samsung S9110, however, above and beyond the added thinnness. The Samsung has a slightly larger (1.76″ vs. 1.43″) capacitive touchscreen and it happens to be cheaper. The LG watch phone is rumored to be north of $1000, but the Samsung S9110 should retail for about $640 when it hits French shelves by the end of the month.

Source: Slashphone

The post Samsung S9110 Challenges LG GD910 for Watch Phone Supremacy appeared first on Mobile Magazine.