LG's Renoir adapts touchscreen sensibility to picture-taking

On the same day Nokia releases its audio-centric XpressMusic 5800 touchscreen smartphone, LG sees the Finnish company's bet with its own camera-centric handset of similar styling.

Named the Renoir, this device combines an 8 megapixel xenon flash camera with unique touchscreen-enhanced features, with a result similar to a tactile viewfinder on a point and shoot camera. A special feature known as "Touch Shot" allows the user to select the area of focus by touching it on the screen, and the shutter fires upon release. It also includes 16x digital zoom, auto- and manual focus, image stabilization, face and smile detection, geotagging, and Schneider-Kreuznach optics.

Video capture has also been given capabilities not commonly found on phones. Frame rate, for example, can go from 5 frames per second time-lapse all the way to 120 fps slow motion.

The list of features also includes: Quad-band GSM and HSDPA connectivity, 802.11 b/g, A-GPS, touch-enhanced photo editing and shot modes, support for DivX, Xvid, and Bluetooth 2.0.

Renoir is the successor to LG's extremely popular Viewty, which was never made available to US customers. Likewise, there looks to be no release planned for the US. It will be debuted in Europe later this month, followed by Asia, Latin America, CIS, Middle East, Africa, and finally China.