Reviews: LG Viewty KU990 - a mobile phone and more

I had my Sony w810i mobile phone for a good 18 months and to be honest when I realised my contract was up and therefore entitled to a new phone I wasn't in that much of a rush to ditch it.

You see it had a decent camera with light that enabled me to take photos in clubs etc. and a very good music player with excellent software, which in combination with my expandable 2gb memory stick pro duo worked like a treat.
But time had moved on and pretty much like the sad phone in the Carphone Warehouse ads, I needed to lay the little black beauty to rest and upgrade my downgradings.
So after a bit of research I lay my faith and next 18-month contact in the LG Viewty KU990.

Now right from the outset I'll admit... it's the poor mans iphone. I just wasn't prepared to pay such a hefty price for a phone plus massive monthly contract.
Also, I have to state I can't stand how you can only get the iphone on o2 and either direct from them or Carphone Warehouse. Do us a favour!

Ok, so after ringing Orange customer services to find out their best deal - then obviously being put through to disconnections so they can upgrade me for free, I wait a couple of days and there it is on my doorstep. A classy looking matt finish black box with flip up lid that pops out a piccy of your new LG Viewty... Good start LG, first impressions count and this had me intrigued from the outset.

I give the phone the obligatory full charge and and fire it up to be greeted by a nice little animation and some funny lucky fella laying around a cup of tea on my wallpaper.

First of all the screen is excellent. Bright, clear and an excellent size. In-fact the screen weighs in at a more than respectable 240 x 400 (3") - wowsers!

So with that size screen, a 5 mega-pixel camera (yep 5 mega-pixel!), flash and a sneaky little camera for video calls, you would expect it to be a bit of a monster. No siree, it is in-fact only 14.8mm thick, 103mm in height and 54.4mm width. Admittedly at first when I held it, it did feel a little wide. But I have decent sized hands (not great big flapping goalkeeper size hands, but decent sized) and I could easily hold the phone in one hand and use my thumb to touch the necessary options.

But what's it's major feature. Well I have touched on it... touched... get it?
It's the whole touch thing, which is the feature of 2008. You just watch how many phones come out with touch screens now! Ok, it's not the first phone to have this feature, infact it's not even the first LG phone as the Prada also had a touch screen.
Infact the LG Viewty really is an upgraded Prada. It took a little while to get used to, but once I did there literally was no stopping me!
Not having keys to text with felt weird for a start, but with the buttons on a screen this large they are obviously big old buttons, so after a few mins I was texting as fast as I could with my Sony.
All in all then... I'm a fan of the whole touch thing... let's move on.

The operating system is slick and everything happens fast enough. However I did enable the vibration on touch so that I knew instantly I had touched and selected the option I wanted.
All the options you expect are here, messaging, address book, calls and more further menus are all quickly accessible from the main screen. But with a quick tap on the screen you can access a plethora of options including camera, video recorder, calculator, organiser, internet, downloads, music store... pretty much everything you could ever want.
I won't go into the standard features such as calendaring, alarms etc. but I will say they all work intuativly with no problems at all.

What this phone's really all about is multimedia.
If you go to the LG Viewty website, you could quite easily be forgiven for thinking you are looking at a camera not a phone at all.
The phone can play .swf (flash) files as well as divx files - the software that comes with the phone has a divx converter which is a nice touch. It can also play WMV and your standard file types for a phone such as 3gp and mpg4.

As I've mentioned the camera is a quality 5mega-pixel with flash. It also has a smorgasbord of options, such as night mode, auto and manual focus, image stabilizer and even face tracking. LG have even given something a little extra with the video recorder, enabling it to record at 120fps for a matrix style slow motion effect.
So with all these multimedia options it's a good job the Viewty lets you expand its 100mb memory by 2gb by using a micro sd card.
Although personally I reckon this could have done with being more.

The music player is also a winner, offering the ability to generate play lists or play tracks by album, artist, genre or just shuffle'em all up.
Although everything’s here, I think the software for the interface to the music player could have been better.
I always loved the interface on the w810i and was perhaps spoilt to have such a good music player on a phone... but I think with the touch screen LG could have pulled something a bit more special out of the bag (ahem iphone ahem).



So to sum it up.

What's hot...
> Touch screen
> Styling
> Camera (both still and video)
> Operating system
> Vast array of formats supported (I didn't even go into the fact it can open pdfs, Word docs, Excel and Powerpoint)
> Intuitive interface

What's not...
> Battery life (although this was slightly expected due to the screen)
> Music player software
...and I'll hold out on how robust it is...

Overall - I'm thinking this is a quality alternative to the iphone.

What is it with LG?

To be honest I don't think I'd touch most of their other equipment, LCD tv's, music players, video recorders etc... but phones - they can make phones... and apparently they've sold more than 310,000 of them across europe already!