LG KU990 Viewty Features and Disadvantages

The LG Viewty has been equipped with a 3-inch 262,144 colour touchscreen monitor. Average colour reproduction is fine. When a colorful object is captured, the colours are not well rendered on the monitor at times. In bright sunlight it is difficult to see clearly what is on the monitor. In this case you will have to go into the shadow or create some shade yourself. The touchscreen monitor responds very well.

The user interface has been fairly well thought through. Four trappable icons at the bottom of the Home screen let you get to messaging, contacts, the dial pad and the main menu of the phone.

The design of the Viewty isn't that different from the Prada phone as both have only three buttons on the front and a rather large LCD display. The UI also shares several common aspects with the Prada phone, but the two are quite different. For starters, the Viewty is quite a bit larger at 103.5 x 54.4 x 14.8 compared to the Prada phone, and it weighs 27g more at 112g. It's still quite pocket friendly by all means, especially compared to many Windows Mobile devices which it is competing against in terms of what's on offer.

Viewing your pictures is almost as good as having your prints in your hand especially when using the landscape setting. Images can be viewed either as standard thumbnail or scattered around the screen which is quite snazzy. You can also zoom in and move your pictures around by brushing your finger over it which means you don't miss any detail.

There is a comprehensive editing suite for images and video footage and the software included is easy to install and use which also allows you back up all you phones data. There is also a music player and FM radio. The web browser is easy to use and allows you to see full web pages and then to zoom. You can even open up two windows at once and toggle between the two. Battery life can be short if you find yourself playing with all the features - if using the camera on a day or night out, browsing the web and viewing images you will need your charger every couple of days.

Key features

* Tri-band GSM/GPRS plus HSDPA support
* 5 megapixel auto focus camera with image stabilization
* Camera strobe flash and focus assist beam
* Secondary video camera for video calls
* 3" 262K color TFT touchscreen display with 240x400 pixels resolution
* VGA video recording at 30 fps
* QVGA video recording at 120 fps
* TV-out support
* Original stylus dongle
* DivX video playback
* Haptic feedback when the screen is pressed

Main disadvantages

* No hot-swap memory card capability
* Having stylus as a dongle is an inconvenient solution
* File management slows once the memory card starts filling up
* Operating the zooming jog wheel gets in the way of the lens


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