LG Viewty KU990 Review

After using the LG Viewty for a month we’ve compiled the good, the bad and the ugly on this little black handset. Two people had the phone for a few weeks and swapped it to get different perspectives.

Good points

• Big bright and colourful screen
• SMS / notes can switch to full screen landscape QWERTY mode which is great for extra speed
• Touch screen is nice as buttons are big enough, (still press two buttons at the same time occasionally though)
• Touch screen tactile feedback is useful, and thoughtful feature when making a phone with minimal hard keys.
• Battery life is good for both standby and normal phone use.
• 3G - Good data speeds
• It can play flash / swf content. (although this feels like an after thought with not so great integration)
• PDF viewer built in, that works fast when compared to ClearVue on Windows Mobiles.
• Excellent bluetooth file support (Windows & mac) and file manager
• The bundled game “Space Commander” was a pretty fun third person shooter on rails game. Worked well with the touch screen.

Bad Points

• Stylus doesn’t sink into phone, the lipstick stylus is both gay and gets in the way when strapped on
• Camera doesn’t live up to the hype in our opinion. We are still looking for the wholy grail of a decent phone & camera and this isn’t it. Whilst the resolution (5MP) and the quality is great there is still a long delay between pressing the button and the camera actually taking a photo plus there is a still amount of blur when taking photos with movement in
• Battery drains quite quickly when using camera with viewfinder or taking videos (in contrast to normal use as battery is good there)
• Youtube one touch upload missing from certain operators, for example our phone on O2 this option doesn’t exist
• I found the jog wheel on the back hard to use ‘naturally’. Since the jog wheel is over to the left on the reverse it feels uncomfortable to use quickly (maybe this is slightly easier for left-handed people, shame it’s not offset to the right as surely most people are right handed?)
• Included software extremely slow, easier to use bluetooth or standard windows removable storage to move files
• No Wifi network capabilities
• Included screen cover didn’t seem to fit nice even when using a squegee (possibly had a badly cut one as it seemed slightly offset)
• When in t9 text entry mode there is no way to add words/names, have to switch to manual mode first.

Overall
A sturdy and great looking phone but not quite as good as what it could have been, still let down with the quality of pictures despite it being 5 mega pixels.

The DivX certified playback of video is a nice extra, but realistically who wants to watch DivX encoded clips on their mobile?

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