LG has created a new line of smartphones with… personalities.

The company is calling them Aka phones (pronounced ‘ah-kah’) and, thanks to sleeve covers embedded with smart chips, the phone changes between four pre-set personalities. They have names.

Eggy is the yellow one, and he “falls in love easily,” said LG’s LTE product planning lead Ramchan Woo to CNet. Soul is the blue Aka, and he loves music and beer, while Wooky (the white version) speaks in slang. Worst of all, the only female Aka personality comes in pink, and her name is Yoyo. She gets her name from her love of soda and hamburgers, which makes her weight “yo-yo.”

When users wave their hand in front of the phone’s front-facing camera, the Aka personality makes a face or something. The UI of the phone is influenced by the Aka personality, changing the colors and style of the phone’s interface. And if you tire of Wooky’s newfangled slang, you can simply buy a new sleeve cover, embedded with a microchip, to switch from one Aka personality to another.

Users can get rewards for their Aka by buying more accessories or connecting with their real-world friends who also have an Aka phone. Aka owners will also be able to take selfies with their phone’s software-based personality, or post to the Aka’s Instagram account. (At first, I thought that was incorrect, but it turns out the Akas have Instagram accounts that their owners can exploit.)

The hardware is mid-range in every way, with a 1.2GHz quad-core processor running under Android KitKat, a 5-inch HD display, 8-megapixel rear camera, 2.1-megapixel front-facing camera, 1.5GB of RAM, and 16GB of internal storage (along with expandable memory via microSD slot).

LG’s new phones are only available in South Korea and are available starting today.

Author: Jordan Crook

Source: TechCrunch