“Slightly stumpy but technically not too frumpy, the LG KU580 phone is just about to hit Europe,” writes Pocket Picks’s Caspar Field.  “The trump card up LG’s sleeve is that its handset will ship with Google service applications pre-installed, including Google Maps and Gmail.”

Yet, setting aside the hardware itself for a moment, there’s the matter of the Google phone’s launch schedule to consider.  “Apparently the KU580 will land in Italy, France, Germany, Romania and the Czech Republic first,” continues Field.  “What?  Why are the Romanians getting this before the UK?  Madness.”

There’s also the whole iPhone thing.  After all, if Google and Apple are trying to become such good friends, should one really be undercutting the other like this?  (Granted, LG may have an equal or greater hand in the Google phone’s release than Google itself.)

In any event, the Google phone appears ready and able to compete with most devices out there.  It “sports a red-on-black color scheme not unlike LG’s popular Chocolate phone, but it’s larger, sporting a 2in widescreen LCD, the better to view Google’s web properties, accessed through a fast 3G connection,” reports Reg Hardware’s Tony Smith.

“The KU-580 has an FM radio and an MP3 player – controlled with dedicated playback keys – along with Bluetooth stereo and 3D sound enhancement,” as well, according to Smith, and “[t]here’s a two-megapixel camera on the back and a smaller snapper on the front for video calls.”

This Google phone may not be amazing – and it may be suffering from a strange launch schedule – but it looks like Google’s sortie into cell phones will do quite well.