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LG Viewty Review

Hardware Smartphone

Written by admin

Monday, 17 March 2008

Page 2 of 2

Interface

The interface is not as intuitive as the iPhones, with no automatic adjustment to the back light or screen rotation when positioning the phone in a landscape direction, but it does make a re-assuring vibration noise when an icon is pressed.

You begin by sliding your finger across the base of the screen to bring up your menu options, each key press does require a bit of pressure in order to activate and at times a few options didn't work as a result, so it take a bit of practice to get the hang of the interface.

The front page themes are also worth mentioning as well, you have a little fish that swims around the screen and when you tap your finger (anywhere on the screen) it moves towards your key press.

For inputting text you have a serious of virtual keyboards that you can use and an alternative Palm style hand recognition system. The latter allows you to use your stylus to write on the screen and will require a bit of practice before you become competent, though for Palm/Windows users you will feel right at home.

When typing with the virtual Qwerty keyboard it will also pop up the letters you have just pressed - similar to the iPhone - but you also have a double tap style keyboard as well.

Its interface does become functional with practice, but a few of the scrolling options are confusing, some times you need to scroll down to go up and then vice versa - you will see what we mean when you get a Viewty for yourself.

Features/Software

The Viewty is packed with a lot of interesting features, the most appealing lies with its 5MP camera.

This has a massive array of options, including a macro lens, image stabiliser, flash support and a 120fps video option. The latter can shoot video footage in super slow mo which is a feature we have not seen on any Smartphone style device in the past.

It’s not all roses though as the shot time is pretty long and the camera button is pretty hard to press, this is why a lot of our images seemed to shift slightly out of focus when taking the final shot - though again it takes practice to use.

Picture quality was not so good in low light conditions indoors, but outside with the macro lens active the quality was stunning.

Unlike the iPhone - which relies on the iTunes store for its content - the biggest appeal to the Viewty lies with its DiVX support (the phone also supports 3GP, MPEG4 MP3, AAC, WMA, WMV and AMR formats).

With the supplied software you get some DiVX conversion software which can be used to convert any of your video files to this medium and it’s definitely the best option to go for as videos looked great and preformed well on the 3" screen.

Also the Viewty comes with a piece of software called Muve Studio which allows you to create video slideshows from your images. So simply pick your images, choose a theme and the device will create a video slide show, which you can then save and share with others.

Tucked away under the options you also have video streaming settings, a Radio function, document viewers, calendar, to do list manager, alarms, calculator, unit converter, photo editing and voice recorder - I think that covers it.

Oh there is also a game supplied as well which is touch screen based shooter, a bit like the 'House of the Dead', where you are led on a pre-set path but have to blast the bad guys as quickly as possible (however we are not sure if this was added for our press version of the phone or is actually supplied as standard).

Performance

Generally the phone performed well, however as you only have around 100MB of shared storage to play with a memory card will be required and as mentioned this becomes a pain to take out and replace.

Also we noticed that when the memory card was loaded with some big images(around 6mb per image) the device did struggle to list the storage cards contents, but to be fair there was 35 of these on our card and a massive array of videos and documents.

Also browsing though the images in the gallery was sluggish, so we advice getting a fast memory card if handling large images/videos.

Music through the internal speakers was also good, the only niggle is the need for a propriety connector for the headphones.

Connectivity

The only down side to the Viewty from a connectivity point of view was the lack of Wi-Fi, however it does offer 3G HSDPA (3.6mbps) support, which was a lot better for rendering web content on the 3" screen.

Web browsing on the whole was great and it can render websites in their entirety and like the iPhone you can zoom into specific areas of the screen.

Battery Life

LG quotes a talk time of four hours and a standby time of 430 hours. However generally we got around two days of moderate use out of the phone before needing a re-charge.

Editor review : Final thoughts

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful


Overall rating		7.8
Features		9.0
Design		8.0
Memory		7.0
Connectivity		8.0
Performance		7.0

The LG Viewty is a product that requires practice, give the phone a few days to get used to the way it works and you will find it an excellent alternative to the iPhone.

For one it offers a much better phone option, 3G HSDPA access, 5MP camera and a front camera for video calls.

Its not without its faults, but if you are after a touch-screen phone as an alternative to the iPhone then look no further.

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