The LG Prada is part of the recent surge in luxury phones that emphasize excessive design over features. The LG Prada sports plenty of the former with its clean, stylish design. It has a 3-inch touch screen display and a simple interface. It also fits comfortably in the hand, although it's a little slippery. It has a decent selection of features, but you pay handsomely for the privilege. The Prada is only available through importers, which means no subsidy to reduce cost. The result is a $799 price tag.

The touch screen makes calling easy, and the Prada managed to complete our dialing test in 5.86 seconds. This is pretty fast for a touch-screen phone. Calling with the Prada is slower than with a phone that has a physical keypad, as the interface takes time to load. Call management is handled well, and sorting through call lists is easily done. Contact management is a different story, however, as the organizational software only offers basic functionality. You’ll find the basic contact management of the LG Prada extremely frustrating if you’re more used to fully featured phones such as Blackberries or ones that run Windows Mobile.

The Prada merely has passable audio quality. The sent sound was good, but the received sound was problematic. Here, the lower frequencies were weak, and the higher frequencies were emphasized too much. The side tone was also a bit out of whack, making your own voice sound too loud.

The camera on the Prada is good by cell phone camera standards. The images it captured had decent resolution and detail, but it's still awful compared to a dedicated still camera. Colors were a little off, and some yellows came out as white. Video capture is fairly hum-drum as well. It looked fine when nothing was moving, but the quality degraded sharply when movement was added, with the video descending into a blurry mess.

Messaging is handled decently on the Prada. SMS messaging has a good interface with enough features to satisfy most users, but e-mail isn't so great. It has the basic functions and will work with most e-mail accounts, but it is nowhere near as fully featured as BlackBerries. The other software available on the Prada is somewhere between standard and unremarkable, offering below average functionality.

The Prada had good battery life for call time, lasting 7 hours and 45 minutes; enough to keep you talking over a weekend or short business trip. The LG Prada lasted a respectable time of 6 hours and 14 minutes while playing music. However, we were not able to run our Web browsing test; the built-in browser was so poor that it stopped working after a few minutes.

Fashion phones are quite a trend overseas, and the fad is starting to creep into our borders. Therefore, it stands to reason the Prada could get by on style and name alone. Unfortunately for the Prada, it came out just before the iPhone, which, despite not being marketed as a luxury device, is certainly seen as one in the public eye. The iPhone looks nicer and has a better set of features. The iPhone is also cheaper, and that's not something we get to say very often. So, then, what does the Prada have to offer? Not much, really. Most phones trump it with functionality, and the iPhone trumps it on ease of use and aesthetics. Really, the only unique selling point of the LG Prada is the Prada label itself.