Hot on the heels of Apple’s iPhone, South Korean vendor LG Electronics officially unveiled the distinctly similar looking KE850 on Thursday.

LG has teamed up with fashion house Prada on the branding of the device, which looks to be an evolution of its highly successful Chocolate phone.

Images of the KE850 had been leaked prior to the introduction of the iPhone and, in terms of looks, the two have already been closely compared.

But now that the full specs for the KE850 have been released, it appears that similarities with the iPhone go beyond the cosmetic.

The Prada phone features a touch screen for almost all functions, although LG has kept a couple of hard keys for call answering and ending. Under the hood the unit has a music player, which it promises can multitask alongside other applications like messaging; a video player; a Macromedia Flash based user interface; and a document viewer for Word and PDF files amongst others.

The phone is EDGE tri-band and features a 2 megapixel camera, microSD card memory slot and USB mass storage functionality.

However, two significant shortcomings of the KE850 are its lack of wifi and full internet capabilities.

The Prada phone will be available from Eur600 in the UK, France, Germany and Italy as of late February, followed by countries in Asia from late March. The Korean version of the phone is scheduled to launch in the second quarter.

On Wednesday morning we reported that Cisco, the owner of the “iPhone” trademark, was waiting for Apple to return a contract covering its usage of the brand. By late Wednesday night the deal appeared to have gone sour and Cisco has now set its legal team on the iPod maker.

In a statement released late Wednesday, Cisco said it had filed a lawsuit in the US District Court for the Northern District of California against Apple, “seeking to prevent Apple from infringing upon and deliberately copying and using Cisco’s registered iPhone trademark”.

Cisco obtained the “iPhone” trademark in 2000 through the acquisition of Infogear, which itself had applied for the trademark in 1996.

Linksys, another division of Cisco, has been shipping a family of wifi-enabled VoIP devices under the iPhone brand since early last year and added launched a handful of new iPhone devices in mid-December.

Given that Cisco and Apple have been in discussions over the “iPhone” trademark for some years, it could be that Cisco knew January was going to bring the big announcement and thought to get a few more of its own iPhone gadgets out a few weeks earlier.

“Cisco entered into negotiations with Apple in good faith after Apple repeatedly asked permission to use Cisco’s iPhone name,” said Mark Chandler, senior vice president and general counsel, Cisco. “There is no doubt that Apple’s new phone is very exciting, but they should not be using our trademark without our permission”.

Later on Wednesday Apple and networking giant Cisco are expected to announce an agreement on the Californian computer company’s licensing of the “iPhone” trademark.

Apple wowed the mobile world on Tuesday with the unveiling of the gadgety goodness that is the iPhone, Apple’s much hyped music player/web browser/phone combo.

But Cisco had rained on Apple’s parade just three weeks earlier, when subsidiary company Linksys launched a bunch of wifi phone devices under the “iPhone” brand.

Late Monday Cisco said that it had been in discussions with Apple for several years now over granting permission for the use of Cisco’s “iPhone” trademark.

The networking company said it expected to receive a signed agreement to the licensing document and public statement on Tuesday night. A further announcement is expected imminently.