12 Apr 2008The LG Viewty is really a successor to the
LG Prada although without the designer brand. If it weren't for the mediocre music functions and the lack of storage space, this would be the handset
Apple should have designed instead of the
iPhone. But as a touch screen camera phone, this device, also known as the LG KU990 is a superb handset at a fraction of the price of many competitors with a similar feature set.
It's easy to start by looking at the design because the Viewty looks like a premium handset. This handset is in a quality black shell with smoothed edges. Much like the
iPhone, the focus is on a thin handset with a large touchscreen on the front. The 3 inch screen doesn't extend to the edges of the unit like on the
iPhone, but is sufficiently large to provide a great video and photo viewing experience as well as functional email and web browsing. At the bottom of the touch screen are convenient physical buttons for Call, Cancel and End Call. It did feel a bit odd having these buttons at the bottom of the handset as they would normally be at the top of a physical keypad. On the right side of the unit there is a switch for choosing between camera, video and playback settings, as well as a shutter button for taking pictures, perfectly placed for landscape shots. On the "back" of the handset surrounding the camera lens there is a jogger wheel that can be used for quickly scrolling up and down on menus, although its placement is perhaps quite likely to result in finger marks on the camera lens over time.
The LG Viewty touch screen is really easy to use and is almost as good as that of the
iPhone, and that is perhaps as much as can really be hoped for. The touch screen menu is easy to navigate and although there is a stylus to use, you probably won't need it for navigating the Viewty menus, but instead just for the drawing and handwriting recognition features. Like all touch screen mobile phones, proficient texting is still slower than on a physical touch-pad, but it is still very fast and efficient. The Apple-like greatness of the touch screen is easier to see when using the photo browser that allows you to drag photos around and zoom in all with a swift movement of your finger. An option that is quite popular although we didn't really like ourselves is to switch on vibration feedback that makes the handset vibrate slightly every time you successfully select something on the touch screen. However, if you text without watching your fingers this is useful as you know if each finger press has been acknowledged.
As far as features go, the camera is definitely the
LG Viewty's strong point. The 5.1 megapixel camera rivals that of the
Nokia N95 and
Samsung G800 in a much nicer package. The quality of the images from the Schneider Kreuznach lens on the LG Viewty doesn't quite match up to the quality from the Carl Zeiss lens of the
Nokia N95 but the Viewty still wins the prize for the best touch screen camera phone. It is the ancillary features of the Viewty's camera function that are more impressive. It has an image stabiliser that reduces blur when taking photos in those trickier or perhaps hurried situations. It also has the ability to take photos at 800 ISO improving nighttime shots even before you use the quality xenon flash. The flash is also a bit disappointing in comparison to other cameras with xenon flash but it is still far better than any LED light on a camera phone. The camera has both an autofocus (still a rarity on reasonably priced camera phones) and a manual focus. The manual focus is great fun to use as you simply jog the dial that surrounds the lens and the focus shifts as you desire. It can also film video at 120 frames per second which is great if you want to show an action shot in slow motion.
The LG Viewty does have a decent media player that can handle MP3, AAC, AAC+, AAC++ and WMA files as far as music. In terms of video playback the Viewty is unusual in its capability to play DivX files, alongside the standard MPEG4 and WMV formats. Unfortunately the Viewty only takes standard SD cards which come up to 2GB in size. This may be enough for some people but it stops it from being a serious contender when faced with the
Nokia N95 8GB and the
Apple iPhone 16GB alongside any other mobile phone handset that can accept the newer SDHC cards that come up to 16GB in capacity. At least 2GB SD cards are cheap so you can buy a few if you want to take a few videos with you for a trip. And there is also an FM radio.
The LG Viewty is capable of video calling via 3G using the second lower quality camera on the front of the handset. In fact, the Viewty is a 3.5G mobile phone handset with HSDPA, the fasting mobile phone browsing experience available in the UK short of Wi-Fi that the handset sadly lacks. The bluetooth capability can be used for standard headsets or for bluetooth headphones for listening to music or videos, and the Viewty also has its own document viewer that can display Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Office formats.
The call quality was fine, although our tests turned up less than perfect results when the Viewty was in a very windy environment. Also, we found that when browsing the web the battery life of the LG Viewty was cut short, presumably because of the mix of using HSDPA and the large size of the display, so that was to be expected.
Overall, we were amazed by the features of the LG KU990 Viewty. As an all around camera phone with strong media and web browsing features although perhaps not a replacement for a separate MP3 player, this is a fantastic device if you don't mind getting something less flashy than the
iPhone.
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