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!

Views: Classic kids tv shows, which ones the best?

I had a smile and a half listening to Chris Moyles on the journey into work today as I was singing along to one of my favourite tunes of my childhood... Ducktails!!!

Yep, that's right, as Moylesy quite rightly pointed out, one of the current hits in the radio one playlist (cant recall its name) sounds like, but not as good as Ducktails! And I was overjoyed when he played the full version of this classic Disney tune.

So after humming the theme for the majority of the morning, I cast my mind back to those heady childhood days sitting in front of citv and cbbc (no cbeebies back then).
My time of childhood tv was in the mid 80s and looking back, boy was I fortunate to have it at such a peak time for kids tv.

Thundercats, Bananaman, Superted, Fraggle Rock, Inspector Gadget, Scooby Doo & Trap Door all amongst my prime tv pics.
It wasn't all cartoons though, Knightrider, Streethawk and the legendry A-Team all stay etched into my happy childhood memories.

One thing that does stand out when you look at all of the above is what made me think about this in the first place... the intro music. All of them have excellent music! If a compilation cd with those little beauties came out tomorrow - I would be straight into the nearest music shop (or at least itunes).

But what if I had to pick just one favourite? Now that wouldn't be easy!

After wracking my brain with this tough teasing thought for approx. 5hrs I decided it came down to two classics, one a cartoon, one a unique adventure game show.

1.


2.


That's right Dangermouse - that majestic mouse with his bespectacled little friend Penfold battling against Barron Greenback.
Or, Nightmare - that classic show with the dungeon master hosting a team of kids who have to help their mate through a computer generated world without the understanding of the difference between left and right.

If I had to pick just one... Knightmare! Done.

Booze: All I want is decent food after some beers!

"I said maybe , You're gonna be the one who saves me ? And after all, You're my wonderwall!!!" - Excellent, you've just sang your lungs out to the last song on the dance floor at the nightclub, had a damn good night out and you're ready for an easy taxi ride home and a good kip.

But hang on, it's 3am in the morning, you've had a few beers and Something’s holding you back. Something’s stopping you getting that taxi... that something is hunger! For some reason even though you had a good tea, nice dinner and even a sneaky sandwich before leaving for your night out, you still need something to eat.

My problem is, where do you go? I can really only write about my experience in Leicester, as this is the place I've tried out the most eateries. But I'll take a damn good guess it's the same in most cities!

The choice here is McDonalds - you know what you get, but surely you can do better.
TJs - Lets face it, nothing special here - it's quick but probably luke warm and pretty greasy.
USA chicken - one of my personal faves as it has a good 6 spicy chicken wings and chips for £2.50... but does it make me content... no!

So last Friday armed with this knowledge I am easily persuaded to try out a kebab shop I'd not tried before... Alivels.
Upon entry I'm not over impressed by the florescent tube strip lighting that makes no food look any good. But obviously things can still be rescued, there are a few people milling about, it's actually quite busy, surely all these people cant be wrong?

It took a little while to get served but nothing too bad. I order cheesy chips and a burger, which lets face it... can't really go that wrong, can it?
3 mins later a decent enough looking burger and chips land infront of me. You read correctly. Burger and chips - minus the cheese.
A fair enough honest mistake... it's busy, the majority of my meal is correct, it's just missing that final element of the cheese.
Obviously this is easily remedied. A quick sprinkle of grated cheese on top... done. Even better they could possibly exceed my expectations and melt the cheese slightly on my chips.
So did this happen? Oh no. This is what happened!!!


That's right... a slice of processed cheese slapped on top of those chips. Unbelievable

The search continues. Alivels... do one!

Views: Attract more visitors by developing a facebook application

Why are you here?
What, out of the millions of web pages on this ever growing beast that is the internet made you click on a link or type in an address to arrive at this page? It may be coincidence and you were searching for something totally different, in which case you are unlikely to have made it to this point in the post.
Hopefully this is not the case. Hopefully you are here because you want to read about why I have developed a facebook application, how I went about doing so and what lessons I learnt that I can pass on to you.


>> So why did I develop a facebook app?

For the very point I was making at the start of this post. To attract more visitors to this site. To gain more exposure and in turn encourage more users to sign up to this blog. In my view there is no point blogging to an audience of 1.

There are over 35.3 million Weblogs on the internet, so to make yours the one that a visitor reads means you have to do more that just post your articles and think the magic of the internet will do the rest.
Facebook is the web app of the moment. It comes and goes in phases, first it was Myspace then Bebo now Facebook. Surfers are fickle creatures that will set up a new profile on the next big social networking site at the drop of a hat, leaving their existing profiles frozen at a perticular point in their lives... sad, but true.


But facebook is where it is at the moment and one of the main reasons behind this is because they have given the power of evolving this network socialising tool to the community that use it.
They've done this by allowing developers to build "widgets" that can be installed in users profiles and these "widgets" can be anything the developer can dream up.

It obviously hasn't taken long for developers to realise that through these widgets they can reach a massive audience faster than ever before possible. Word of mouth is the most powerful viral marketing tool available and this platform gives a perfect way of starting that marketing. So this is the reason I set about developing a facebook app, I wanted more visitors to this website and hopefully, as you are reading this... that's already started to work!


>> How did I build the facebook app?

First of all I needed an idea for a facebook widget. If you're a user of the site, I'm sure you will have noticed there is an absolute deluge of widgets that let you see how you compare to your friends, how popular you are or even what object such as car, vegetable or animal you are like. These are all good fun and have their place.
But I wanted to create something that users could get involved with and hopefully get a little more out of using.

I looked at my interests and the fact that I was trying to come up with an idea to engage more people with my website. One of my favourite shows on the box is Dragons Den, so I wondered if I could develop an app based around this show. "Pitch to the Dragons" is what I came up with. Where facebook users can pitch their idea to their friends for them to comment on and rate.


Fortunatly I have a background in php, which is one of the primary languages you can use to develop these widgets. The other language you need to become familiar with is FBML (Facebook Markup Language). This is where I really have to take my hat off to the developers of facebook. They have created an evolved subset of HTML which allows you to hook into the users profiles, mini feeds etc... and display elements in a facebook style in-keeping with the site.

I'm not going to go through the coding of my application, but I will say that with a sound knowledge of php it took me approx 18hrs to develop. Obviously this wasn't continuous I was doing it in my spare time.
That said, I am now familiar with FBML and the anatomy of a facebook app, so the next application should be a lot quicker (depending on complexity!).

>> What did I learn that I can pass on to you?

First of all that you need to download the PHP (4 and 5) Client Library. This includes many facebook functions that you will need to develop you app. One lesson here was to make sure you know the version of php your using and therefore use the correct library.

Once you've uploaded the correct library, you may come across this error when trying to access it...
Fatal error: Failed opening required 'IsterXmlExpatNonValid.php', this is because you also need an XML library that can be found here Make sure you reference it correctly and the error should disappear.

The second lesson I learnt was using the Default FBML which is in your applications "Edit Settings" page.
I was trying for ages to get the actions I wanted in the users profile into this box. Unfortunately its rather restricted and you can better configure what the user sees in their box through the set up when they install your app.

You really need to setFBML for the users profile. To do this in php build what you want the user to see in their profile into a variable then call your facebook api client profile_setFBML function, e.g. $facebook->api_client->profile_setFBML($markup); //where $markup is what the user will see in their profile.

Aside from these two issues, everything really did run smoothly. My only other suggestion would be to use the FBML code as much as possible to make your app look like a facebook app.

So, has it worked? Only time will tell. I will post a follow up to let you know the difference it has made... At the moment I'm just hoping the next killer social networking application isn't going to spring up tomorrow!