South Korea’s LG Electronics Monday unveiled what it described as the world’s first watch-shaped mobile video phone.

The “3G watch phone” model has a touch-screen dialling system with a camera and a speaker built in to enable users to make video calls over a high speed internet connection, LG Electronic said in a statement.

It also recognises voices, transforms text to speech, has a Bluetooth function and plays MP3 music.

The product has a 3.63-centimetre (1.43-inch) screen and is 13.9 millimetres (0.56 inches) thick. It will be on display at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas from January 8 to 11.

LG Electronics said it plans to launch the handset in European markets sometime next year.

Netflix and LG Electronics said on Sunday that LG will soon introduce TV sets that can screen Netflix movies directly from the Web without an external box.

Last year, the U.S. DVD rental company and the Korean electronics giant launched set-top boxes and Blu-ray DVD players equipped with the same Netflix software.

Netflix, which is seeking to equip all home-entertainment screens with instant movie-viewing capability, also announced other partnerships, including one with Microsoft’s Xbox 360 to embed the movie software in its game consoles.

Netflix subscribers who buy one of these devices can hook it up to their TVs to watch movies that can be downloaded from the Internet instantly, as part of their monthly rental plan.

Subscribers can choose from about 12,000 movie titles and television episodes for instant viewing — an option the company introduced in 2007. Netflix’s entire library consists of more than 100,000 titles.

The new high-definition LG televisions, which will be on view at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, are targeted at those Netflix customers who want the convenience of Internet-to-TV movies without the clutter of a set-top box or an additional DVD player.