While whisper-thin phones are being released one after the other, LG Electronics, the world's fourth largest phone maker has decided to go wide with its release of the LG-U8550. First seen last month in Italy this neon clamshell is expected to be released in the UK and Korea very soon and in Hong Kong and Australia early next year.

The U8550 features two screens including a square 2-inch, 220x220 65K TFT color display on the inside. It also has a 1.3 megapixel camera, a secondary camera for 3G video calling, Bluetooth, an XHTML web browser, email client, Java support, 20MB of internal memory, a TransFlash card slot.

This UMTS-GSM/GPRS Triband phone also has impressive multimedia capabilities with support for the following formats, MP3, AAC, MPEG4, WMV and H263. External controls allow users to access multimedia functions without opening the phone.

We're not sure about future releases but at least in Italy it came with a speaker stand/dock called the SoundSytem which is similar to the inMotion brand of iPod docks. Via Mobile Korea / Tre IT.