With a solid reputation as LG’s best phone yet, the KU990
Viewty is LG’s foray into the high-technology camera phone market. Boasting over 7.5 cm of touch screen space,
this Viewty finally brings the promise of touch screen heaven into reality.
Out of the box the phone includes a USB cable, a stylus pen,
the LG PC Suite as well as its own DivX converter. The easy interaction with the phone using the
touch screen means that even the most resistant techno-phobe can jump right in
and begin using the highly intuitive interface.
The 262 thousand color screen displaying at a 240 x 400 pixel resolution
features a home page with animated arrows running along the bottom edge. Simply run your finger along them and you’ll
get a 3 X 3 bank of icons popping up that offer you access to an impressive
array of built in features and utilities.
You can bring up your internet browser, or perhaps do a bit of instant
messages, set up and manage profiles, as well as your games and any other
installed applications. You also have
memo functions, alarms, a My Stuff storage area, your customized calendar, and
your Blue Tooth settings. If you sweep
your finger along the animated arrows again they disappear from view. All in all, it’s a beautiful and highly
intuitive and user friendly way to interact with your new mobile phone.
You can customize the look and feel of your touch screen
interaction even further with three built-in themes. The Black theme features a simple black
background. The Silver theme is light
grey with animated graphics, but our favorite theme is Fish. The Fish theme features an animated goldfish
that swims towards your fingertip when you touch the screen. The slightest bit useful? Probably not.
Charming? Absolutely! Themes are going to be predictably popular so
we’re confident we’ll have some cool themes to look forward to for add-ons in
the near future.
The beauty of the screen makes photo management more fun
than it would be otherwise, but this is one area that we’re looking forward to
seeing a bit of improvement. The
incredibly powerful camera functions make picture taking a breeze, but there’s
still a bit of work left to be done in using the KU990 Viewty to view and
manage them. Although during our review
were able to easily pull up our sample photos and use the touch screen to slide
them around until we were able to view the part of the picture we wanted to
focus on, pulling them got a big sluggish at times. We don’t consider this much of a drawback
since most people will probably prefer to use their PC to manage their photos
for the most part anyway, but if you plan on making extensive use of the phone
to manage them it’s sure to become a bit tedious at times.
Touch screen technology has been making us promises for a
long time that the LG KU990 delivers on beautifully. If this edition is this easy to use and this
powerful, we can’t wait to see how LG improves on it for next years design, but
in the meantime, we’re making good use of all the capabilities that it offers
us.
Andrew Wallis is a gadget geek and loves putting the latest tech toys to the
test. Although usually found in whatever part of the store carries the latest
and greatest, we can occasionally find him online recommending resources like
the latest info on Mobile Phones in the
UK for Dial To Save.
