Lg Viewty Red (Vodafone) Vodafone UK £35.00
	Lg Viewty Red (Vodafone) Vodafone UK £63.94

RATING:

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SUMMARY:

3-inch touchscreen, Web browser, fast 3G and HSDPA (3.5G) Internet access and 5.1 MP camera with an impressive 120 fps video capture rate. No Wi-Fi.

LG Viewty Review

The LG Viewty's key benefits include the 5.1 MP camera with autofocus and flash, video capture at 120 fps (at QVGA resolution), its proprietary Web browser and its super 3-inch touchscreen with haptic feedback (the screen keys vibrate on touch).

Design

The LG Viewty (KU990) is a little taller and thinner than the phone's earlier look-a-like - the LG Prada. It's a reasonable weight - a bit above average.

Beneath the 3-inch touchscreen are 3 hardware buttons - send call, cancel and end call keys. They are big enough and easy to press.

3-inch touchscreen: The 3-inch 240 x 400 (WQVGA) touchscreen is excellent. Bright and vivid colours. Use your fingertips or the stylus to select screen items. As with other touchscreens mobile phones, the LG Viewty screen gets grubby from fingerprints.

A chunky stylus pen is included in the box. You can attach the stylus pen to the phone using the provided hand strap - slide through the eyelet at the top left of the phone.

Haptic feedback: 'Haptic' means 'relating to the sensation of touch'. On pressing a screen key, the screen vibrates. You can change the vibration type and strength settings.

Memory card slot: The LG Viewty has 100 MB phone memory and a microSD memory card slot (up to 2 GB supported). The memory card slot is beneath the battery, so it's not hot-swappable. You could hold approx. 650 songs on a 2 GB card. Or perhaps 30 movies at 70 MB each.

For comparison, the Apple iPhone v1 and the latest Nokia N95, each have 8 GB storage space.

Jog wheel: The back of the phone features the Schneider Kreuznach (cute name) lens. Encircling the lens is a jog wheel - move the wheel to scroll, zoom, get manual focus, adjust volume and adjust other camera settings.

Because there is no camera lens cover, there's the possibility that you might put your fingers on the lens (and dirtying the lens) when using/finding the jog wheel.

Features

5.1 Megapixel Camera

The key LG Viewty feature - the 5 megapixel camera (2592 x 1944 pixels) with 16x digital zoom, Schneider Kreuznach lens, Xenon strobe flash, assist light, manual focus, auto focus and digital image stabilizer.

Manual focus = a unique mobile phone feature; first for a mobile phone. Move the jog wheel to get focus.

The digital image stabilizer reduces the effects of camera shake. Pixels are added outside the border of the visible frame to provide a buffer for the motion. It could work another way, we didn't check this. Not as good as optical image stabilizers which you find on many dedicated cameras.

Hardware keys: The right side of the Viewty features 3 hardware keys - from top to bottom: a switch mode key (camera, video and playback), a lock/unlock screen key and a decent-size camera key.

Camera settings include image size, ISO (up to 800), image quality, self-timer, shutter sound, macro mode, flash (off, auto, red-eye), focus method, white balance, scene modes and shooting modes.

We've seen the flash described as a "strobe flash". Not sure of how this differs from a proper Xenon flash, but the LG Viewty flash isn't as bright as a Xenon flash on the Sony Ericsson K850i.

Image quality: Very good. Take the photos in landscape mode. Photos compare well to other 5 MP camera phones - Sony Ericsson K850i and the Nokia N95.

120 fps video capture: The LG Viewty can capture video at 120 fps (at QVGA resolution), 30 fps at VGA resolution. Video playback is at 30 fps. Record at 120 fps and playback to view the videos in slow motion.

Videos are saved in .3gp or .avi format. A YouTube link lets you upload your videos directly to YouTube. This feature is only available on some mobile networks.

DivX: The Viewty supports DivX video up to VGA (640 x 480). Other video format support includes MPEG4, WMV, H.263 and H.264.

Photo viewer: You can view your photos using the nifty photo viewer application. Drag photos around, tap one to bring it to the front, tap the corner to view image information. Pretty good stuff.

Image / video editing: The LG Viewty has a photo and video editing application. Edit your files before sending them off via email, EMS or MMS.

Internet Access

Very good. 3G and HSDPA (up to 3.6 Mbps) offer fast Internet download speeds. The Viewty uses a proprietary Web browser. Just like the Apple iPhone, the browser shows the full page at a reduced size. Zoom in/out using the on-screen keys or use the jog-wheel around the lens. Pan around the screen by dragging your finger.

No Wi-Fi: The Viewty does not have Wi-Fi connectivity.

Call Quality

The volume was loud enough and the quality was fine.

'Call quality' is one of those features which is very difficult to make a solid judgement on. There are lots of possible reasons for poor call quality. Reasons include:

• Wireless network issues
• Echo cancellation technology
• Signal strength
• Weather conditions
• Barriers between your phone and the mast
• The recipient's phone
• The caller's phone
• Your phone's earpiece, receiver, antenna or software

Call quality can refer to issues such as: dropped/disconnected calls, echo, background noise, voice intelligibility, static/interference, failed connections, voice distortion and more.

3G calls can offer better voice call quality - more capacity and better technology.

Connectivity

The connector for peripherals is on the left side of the phone. There's Bluetooth 1.2 (not as fast transfer rates as Bluetooth 2.0). There's A2DP support - you can use your wireless Bluetooth headset to listen to music.

Text Input

Use ABC, handwriting recognition or a QWERTY keyboard. QWERTY should be quickest. T9 predictive text is available. I've used handwriting recognition on lots of phones - every time it was slower than using a QWERTY keyboard.

If your handwriting strokes aren't precise, you get errors. Not closing the top of an 'a' or an 'o' typically resulted in a 'u'. Doh! Thus, we had to write slower to make sure my writing was good enough for the recognition to work. Too slow. The QWERTY keyboard was much better.

Battery life

Battery life is OK. Expect to get a couple of days use out of the Viewty before needing to recharge. 5.9 hours 2G talktime, 3.9 hours talk time on a 3G network.

Other features

There's a document viewer (txt, pdf, doc, ppt and xls files), a simple FM radio with RDS support, voice recording, music player (basic), TV-out, video player, photo viewer, photo and video editor.

You can make 3G video calls - there's a front-facing VGA camera. The 3-inch screen is pretty good for viewing the other caller. There's also a nifty 3D shoot-em-up game - Space Commando, calendar, calculator, world clock and unit converter.

Summary

Good 3G mobile phone. Key benefits are the 3-inch touchscreen, Web browser, fast 3G and HSDPA (3.5G) Internet access and 5.1 MP camera with an impressive 120 fps video capture rate.

If it's a camera phone you seek, the only comparable camera phones are the latest Sony Ericsson camera phones - the latest being the Sony Ericsson K850i.

TAGS: touchscreen, 3g, hsdpa, music, 5.0 MP camera, big screen, bar phones

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