Remember When Prada Made A Cell Phone?

Back when the iPhone was announced, in January 2007, it wasn’t the only beautifully designed touch-screen phone in town. It had a big competitor: the LG Prada. The LG Prada—yes, that Prada—was the world’s first capacitive touch-screen phone, which meant it was the first phone to look the way every phone in the world, including the iPhone, now looks: The entire device was a glass screen coated with a conductor that allowed the human finger to control it. (Not a keypad in sight, just a big glass screen living in the moment!) Though the iPhone’s ubiquity seems like it was inevitable now, back in 2007, when you would ask your friends for directions and decide what to eat based on where it fit into a giant government-issued triangle, the LG Prada was “definitely a worthy competitor to the iPhone that we should keep our eye on,” according to a review published in Gizmodo. The LG Prada was announced about a month before the iPhone, but LG and Prada had been openly discussing its creation since 2006, when the phone was presented at Germany’s prestigious iF Design Awards and won—which, in retrospect, seems like an uneasy precursor to Apple’s infamously elusive development process. Read more at GQ.