As we become more aware of the various viscera inside our gadgets, otherwise unremarkable gadgets seem suddenly… strange . Take the LG Arena Max LU9400: It’s almost definitely a feature phone, but it’s got the spec sheet of a Nexus One. The Arena Max is a 3.5-inch screen handset with all the iron you’d expect, including a Wi-Fi, GPS and a five-megapixel camera, and a little you wouldn’t, like a 1GHz Snapdragon processor—the same brain you’d find in the Nexus One, the HTC Touch HD2, and the Sony Xperia X10. In other words, it’s a monster. But if it’s anything like its predecessor —and these early shots seem to indicate that it is—it’ll be treated to (burdened by?) an in-house OS and UI, most probably LG’s flashy-but-limited S-Class experiment .

Clocking in at 1:48, this glimpse at LG’s IQ (a.k.a. Monaco ) is indeed very brief and not much is said. It’s got a fingerprint sensor lock, S-class UI ( which we knew ), and that backing is definitely Windows Mobile 6.5, but for everything else we’ll have to refer to the previous specs we’ve seen leaked. As noted twice by the voice behind the on-screen hand, it’s coming “this holiday season” and will be exclusive to Telus, so all the fine print should be revealed soon. Video after the break

You can forget the teasers , promotional videos , and info leaks , because this is the real thing: Live, in-the-flesh shots of LG’s Chocolate BL40 phone. We knew it was long, but this handset looks like it’s been literally stretched . With the photos comes a spec list, which is only new in the sense that it comes from someone who has the device; it confirms more or less everything we already knew: - UMTS / HSDPA - 800×345 screen - Position sensor - 5-megapixel camera with a Schneider-Kreuznach lens and flash - Wi-Fi - FM transmitter - About 335 MB of internal memory, expandable via SD card. On top of that, the Dutch tipster says that the interface is a variant on LG’s S-Class UI —which was also widely-anticipated—and to show us a second, smaller, and less oblong phone, which looks a bit more like the Chocolate features phones of yore, and less like something any of us will really care about. Disregarding obvious TBDs like price, release date and carrier options, there isn’t a whole lot we don’t know about this device now, except how it will be to use.

The sliding point where cameraphones and point-and-shoot cameras seems to keep moving towards the latter. The latest hybrid is the 720p, 12-megapixel LG GC990 Louvre , which, at least from the back, actually looks like a camera. We can get nervous about the potential quality of such high-res photos and video coming from such a small sensor all we want, but on paper, the GC990 does well: the camera shoots through a Schneider-Kreuznach lens, gets lighting help from a Xenon flash module, and shoots up to ISO 3200, though I can’t imagine the noise levels being anywhere near tolerable. As for the phone side of this brick, we’ve got a 3.2-inch touchscreen showing LG’s interesting S-class 3D UI .