Mobile Phone Can Read Books
LG Electronics, the world's fourth-largest cell phone vendor, has added another compelling feature to the mobile handset - reading books for the visually impaired.
The Seoul-based company yesterday started marketing the model, the LF1300, through LG Telecom, the country's smallest wireless operator, at around 400,000 won.
Only the blind, visually-impaired and dyslexic can buy the talking phone after presenting a government certificate at sales outlets of LG Telecom.
Users of the gadget can download approximately 300 audio books from the Internet site of LG Sangam Library to their handsets in two ways.
One is to access the digital library's Web site (www.lg.or.kr) on a computer specially designed for the blind to get the audio books and transfer them to cell phones.
The other is to download the digital books directly with cell phones>>through the wireless network by touching a hot key on the LF1300 handset. Both methods are free of charge.
On top of its unique feature of reading books, the LF1300 is not inferior. To the contemporary top-line phones in both outlooks and functionalities.
The sleek 16-millimeter-thick gizmo is armed with an MP3 player and a Bluetooth headset, which enables users to listen to the music or talks without a cord.
The user interface of the LF1300 is also customized for the blind, Enabling handset users to control it through a voice guidance system.
However, there is a hitch because the phone's internal memory of 17megabytes is small even for a single audio book file, which takes up 80 MB on average.
As a result, a high-volume external memory, which is available at electronics shops, is a must for the talking book services.
