LG KU990 Viewty

LG Viewty is a true beauty. Simple and elegant. Rightly named as 'Viewty' since its powerful 5 mega pixel autofocus camera certified by Schneider-Kreuznach for distinct clarity and Xenon flash captures the visuals so beautifully that you will never miss your camera again. Actually the back side of LG KU990 remarkably looks almost like a digital camera.  The phone is great in terms of its video recording capabilities. It can capture video in VGA resolution at 30 fps which is considered as DVD-like quality but what's amazing is at QVGA resolution the frame rate can go up to 120 fps which is among the world's fastest recording speed. This speed is normally required for slow motion movies. Most digital cameras and camcorders nowadays can go only up to 60 fps.The video recordings are stored in AVI file format with DivX 5.0 encoding which ensures balance between file size and quality. You can watch videos in fullscreen landscape mode. Although XviD and DivX 6 videos are not supported which is a disadvantage as XviD videos are quite popular these days.  The 5 mega pixel camera is amazing with a sharp camera lens and a jog wheel to control digital zoom. No protective cover for camera lens is a minus point. It takes pictures at a maximum resolution of 2592 x 1944 pixels and uses full display as  viewfinder. An interesting Smart Light function applied to underexposed images brings out good results.  The camera interface also has several settings where you can use preset scene modes like landscape, beach, party, portrait, night, etc. In addition there are some special shooting modes like continuous shot, panorama and frames. You can select he best picture using the Continuous shot mode while Panorama mode makes panorama images out of several subsequent shots.  In the front, large 3 inch touchscreen display with 240 x 400 pixels resolution makes viewing video or pictures such a delight. Top right corner above the screen features a secondary VGA camera for video calls.   There is no physical keypad at all. Only three hard keys green and red for Call and End and a Cancel key. You want to dial a number a virtual keypad appears on the screen. If you want to write a message, a soft qwerty keyboard is there at your disposal. You can also use handwriting recognition software for writing text. The touchscreen is equally responsive with a finger as it is with the stylus. Also the touch screen is haptics-enabled, which implies that every press is recognised by a gentle vibration.

Removing the back panel is easy. Viewty is powered by 1000 mAh Li-Ion battery which is good enough. The SIM card slot and the microSD memory card slot are accessible only after you remove the battery. 

The phone size 103.5 x 54.4 x 14.8 mm weighing 112 g is comfortable to hold in one hand also and operate with a finger. The phone's loudspeaker is among the loudest. 

The user interface is pretty good with a task manager that adds up all open applications in the Multitasking list once they are launched. The standby screen displays information about the battery status, current profile and signal strength along with task manager icon. It can also display a clock and a calendar. The bottom of the screen has a navigation bar with shortcuts to the main menu, Dial pad, messages submenu and the contacts list.

The main menu displayed on the right of the screen has four submenus. One contains functions related to calls and messages. The second one devoted to entertainment hosts the multimedia files, camera, FM radio, games, music player, web browser and streaming video applications. The third submenu includes organizer applications such as the Calendar,  Calculator, Unit converter etc. while the fourth submenu consists of the phone settings.

For emails, LG KU990 supports both POP3 and IMAP4 protocols. The maximum size for attachments in incoming mail is 400KB. You can have setting to auto retrieve your new emails at a preset time interval.

The LG KU990 has 100MB internal memory and a microSD memory card slot which is unfortunately hidden under the battery. The My stuff icon in the menu or the file manager includes preset folders for different multimedia content. You can copy or move files to the external memory or send them via Bluetooth.

You can see office documents also like MS Word documents, MS Excel and PDF files using the Picsel viewer. Scrolling and zooming on documents is fast. The documents can be seen in landscape mode too. It also has a flash player to play .swf animation files.

The KU990 features an MP3 player also that can filter tracks by artist, album, genre, playlist, recently played etc. The handset has a Flight mode too. However there is no equalizer to fine tune the sound. The phone has FM radio and RDS support.

The LG KU990 has very good web browser. Browsing in landscape view is much more enjoyable experience. A small map and  tabbed browsing makes it still more convenient. Viewty comes with integrated YouTube. You can upload your video files to YouTube directly from the file manager easily. There is also a preinstalled Google package that includes Google search, Gmail, Blogger and Google Maps for Mobile application.

Advantages:
5 megapixel camera with image stabilization and autofocus
Xenon flash
Secondary video camera for video calls
3" , 240x400 pixels, 262K color TFT touchscreen display
QVGA video recording at 120 fps
TV-out support
DivX video playback
 
A beautiful camera phone, one of the best in its class.