Review: LG Viewty KU990 mobile

VIEW TO A VIEWTY: The LG Viewty is one swish cameraphone, with a great touchscreen.

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This LG touchscreen Vodafone 3G mobile has some snazzy features, and as a cameraphone it's definitely top notch.

It certainly looks swish. Most cameraphones look like phones, but most people thought this was a camera. It's the size of a slim digital camera, with the back dominated by the 3-inch touchscreen. There are three buttons below this - call, end and cancel.

The Viewty's touchscreen is very responsive. You can set it to vibrate slightly when you press a button if you like a bit of sense of touch. On the main screen, swishing your finger left or right brings up a shortcuts menu.

Scrolling is a bit of the pain. Even with practise going down or up lists or swishing your finger to the side isn't easy.

Like all touchscreens, it's prone to fingerprints, and you'll want to invest in some sort of case to stop it getting scratched after months of use. And if you've got thick fingers like me, you might find yourself yearning for a button or two more.

The icons on the Viewty are a bit on the small side, and I'm not alone in finding it tricky to press on the right one.

There is a feature that translates your handwriting into text, letter by letter, for emails and SMS works well, though you need the stylus to be able to do it effectively. Otherwise texting and dialing is down on the touchscreen with a virtual representation of a normal keypad or a virtual qwerty keyboard (displayed horizontally).

The qwerty keyboard is a nice idea, but in practice my fingers (especially thumbs) are too big to make it workable. I just made too many mistakes. If you have thin fingers you may find it easier.

There's no Wi-fi, which seems like an oversight, since the Nokia N95 (another 5MP cameraphone) has it.

The phone has the standard applications - calculator, convertor, voice recorder    - as well as something called "Muvee studio" which combines your photos with music to make slideshows (saved as MP4 files). No office-type apps though.

The 5MP camera is good, though there's no lens cover on it. The rim around the lens zooms in and out. This rim also adjusts volume during calls and scrolls through menus. This last function takes a bit of getting used to (though helps to compensate for the difficulty I had using the touchscreen to scroll) and is a bit uncomfortable to use one-handed.

There is a xenon flash instead of LED.

On the side of the phone (top when you've got it horizontal for a photo) are the shutter button, hold button and switch (for camera, video, and play modes). The shutter button doubles as the shortcut to switch it from phone to camera.

The video function can shoot a staggering 120 frames per second (QVGA, only 30fps on VGA). This seems like overkill (a regular compact digicam will do about 30fps), and it is, because it's meant for filming fast-moving objects in slow motion. It's not terrifically useful, but it is fun to film everyday objects (like animals, joggers) moving in slow motion.

 The camera also has a digital image stabilizer to make your photos less blurry, though in practice it doesn't work as well as an optical image stabilizer. The quality of the images was very good for a camera phone, and it certainly does it faster than Nokia's N95.

The phone also has a built-in image editor, which lets you add text and cut-out images (hearts, butterflies, stars, etc), crop the picture, or add effects to blur, sharpen, or change colours. There's also a basic face morphing feature to make people smile or frown more, or just give them fat faces.

It's HSDPA, which means 3.6Mbps download speeds for Web and email.

Audio support is good - MP3, AAC, WMA and WMV. The phone also supports the Divx video format, which is a nice touch if you like watching movies on the run. There's a basic video editor to speed up/slow down, dub over audio and more.

Overseas model include a function to upload videos directly to YouTube, but this wasn't in the model I reviewed.

You can sort music by album and artist, like on an MP3 player.

Sound quality was pretty good through the speakers, though you need to plug in your earphones into an adaptor (included), which fits in the phone's USB connection.

I personally had trouble moving music on to the phone (got there, just took a loooong time), but I haven't seen any problems with this in other reviews of the Viewty, so it was probably my computer.

The stylus, which you'll need for handwriting on screen but not much else, is attached to the phone as dongle. It's understandable that LG has packed so much into the phone they didn't have space for the stylus, but it does get bloody irritating flapping about and it smacks noisily against the phone.

As downsides go, it isn't huge, but most people will be better off without the stylodongle. I'd go as far as saying I wouldn't use the phone with it attached, it's just that annoying.

It charges via USB or mains power. There are shortcuts for mobile TV, blogging, and an FM radio.

Battery time on standby is specced at 13 days on 3G or 2.5G, with about 200 minutes of talk time on either. In practice, if you use the phone for an organiser or music player, expect to charge it every day or two.

The LG Viewty is a good phone then, especially if you're in the market for a high-end camera and aren't picky about the extras that come with digicams. It is, however, expensive. Putting all this stuff together in one package will cost you about a grand. You can get a decent basic phone and camera for that price separately.