LG Viewty KU990

At A Glance:

The Viewty KU-990 is a 5.0 megapixel candybar camera phone from LG which is feature-filled and has full touchscreen capability, HSDPA 3.5G and a flurry of features.

In the box

• Travel charger
• USB Data Cable
• LG Viewty KU 990
• Ear Headset
• Stylus
• 256MB MicroSD

The faceplate is a 262K TFT colour 3-inch display covering the front of the phone. The three buttons on the front of the phone are the call and end buttons. Meanwhile the cancel button is between the two. The faceplate is the typical easily soiled/smudged material but LG decided to give a complimentary screen cover to counter this problem.

On the right spine of the phone, the KU 990 has digital camera functions, where there is a dial to push between photo, video and gallery options. The camera shutter button is here too, as well as the hardware lock/unlock key, which doubles as the camera's image stabilizer.

The left spine has the universal port, which has a sliding protective cover for the port to keep out any unwanted breakfast chunks.

When you flip the Viewty to the back, the phone looks almost identical to a digital camera, with the Schneider-KREUZNACH camera here. The jog-dial is wrapped around the lens, meanwhile the unprotected xenon flash and focus assist light right beside the lens. The jog dial is multi-functional, as it is able to dial th img src="/gen/prodspics/lg/viewty_ku990/6.jpg" border=1>

The LG KU 990 Viewty comes with an original stylus dongle that doesn't plug anywhere into the handset. It is attached to the handstrap instead. It's quite innovative and looks great, but we're not convinced that it's that convenient to have your stylus dangle alongside the handset in everyday use. Additionally, some observers have pointed out that the retractable stylus is easily damaged due to constant pulling.

Interface
The Viewty KU 990 user interface is based on Flash technology, and while not a smartphone- the proprietary OS has some neat functions and features. The home screen has battery status, main menu and the ringtone profiles on top.

The bottom of the homescreen has four shortcut keys to access the main menu, the dial function, messaging and phonebook. The homescreen can also display either clock or calendar or both at the same time, or you can tweak it to show a clean screen.

If you look closely at the homescreen, there will be arrows pointing to both ends of the screen like a neon sign pointing towards a burger, flicking either of them brought us to a quick menu for the Viewty. It has a 3x3 grid to frequently used programs. When you are done with the quick menu, with another flick the grid slides neatly and quickly back in.

However, none of the shortkeys in either menu allows for user configuration, and you are stuck with default settings.

The main menu is where the Viewty's deeper function lies. It is split into four sub-menus and is extremely user-friendly, even if the sub-menus are not expressly indicated. The first sub menu is for call functions and messaging, meanwhile the second one is for entertainment. The third sub menu is the PIM menu and the fourth and final sub menu handles the phone settings.

By default, the user interface comes in the black and white theme, well-known from the LG Prada phone. There are two other themes that come in full colour, with beautiful icons. One of them offers a fish swimming on your display. You can change the wallpaper on the welcome screen if you wish.

The Viewty has a preloaded Google web browser and Youtube. The Viewty's Youtube application allows users to upload their videos straight.

The KU 990 has a tactile vibrate function when performing action on the Viewty- called haptics. It's a nice little touch by giving tactile feedback when clicking on an icon- we had a much easier time navigating the phone.

On another note, the Viewty slows down considerably after storing too much content in either the phone memory or the MicroSD slot. We tested it by storing 600 photos subsequently the gallery section of the phone became unresponsive and froze the Viewty itself.

Messaging
The Viewty messaging department gets a nifty feature, namely handwriting recognition. You can use the stylus to input text or you can even edit text that has already been typed.

There are several text input methods - keypad, QWERTY keyboard, handwriting on the screen, and handwriting in box.

Unfortunately, the handwriting recognition doesn't score as high as it suppose to. It is slightly unresponsive and needs little getting used to when writing quickly, which we don't recommend. The handwriting in box is another feature we don't understand- the box doesn't serve any purpose either than to box up our letters.

The QWERTY keyboard is perhaps the most functional for messaging, as you switch the phone into landscape mode and type into it using your thumbs. The keyboard is slightly reminiscent of the iPhone but we won't knock something that works. It's easy to get the hang of and especially if you are familiar with the PC's keyboard.

The final one is the keypad function which is basically a virtual version of a keypad. SMS junkies will find the virtual keypad with less tactile feel compared to a physical one.

PIM
The Calendar, Memo, Alarms, Organiser and Tools comprises of the PIM section for the phone. The Tools split up into a Converter, Calculator and a World Clock.

Camera/Video Performance
The Viewty's 5.0 megapixel Schneider-KREUZNACH camera is the main highlight of the phone. It comes with ISO technology and an Image Stabiliser to assist with taking photos. The camera is able to snap up to 2592x1944 pixels of resolution with a 10 second self-timer. As mentioned, the Viewty has a hardware jog-dial at the camera lens, which works manual zoom in/out for the camera.

The gallery application launched by this switch is really wonderful - all your images and videos are shown as a shuffled deck of pictures. A touch on any of the images brings it to the front; a second touch on the image corner displays image info.

The camera interface has wide-ranging settings. You can use several preset scene modes (landscape, beach, party, portrait, night, sport, high sensitive), plus there are some special shooting modes (continuous shot, panorama and frames).

The Continuous shot mode shoots several pictures at the same time, while the Panorama mode makes panorama images out of several consequent shots. Meanwhile, frames mode is for comedic purposes. You can fit your best friend's face in a pirate wardrobe.

The photos really impressed us, as pictures came out with much of the colour intact. At maximum settings, the quality was pretty close to a digital camera quality.

The Viewty's video recording is compressed with the DivX 5.0 encoding, to ensure a balance between video quality and video size. The Viewty's also records up to 120fps, which is extremely high framerate compared the usual 24fps.

At 120fps, the recording switches to slow-motion recording, LG calls the mode QVGA QVS and while the capture occurs at 120 fps, the resulting AVI file is stored at 15 fps slowing down the recorded action 8 times.

When recording at 120fps, testing showed that the locals we were shooting at require plenty of light for the camera to capture a slow motion video properly.

Multimedia
The LG KU990 comes with a good 100MB of internal memory and a microSD memory card slot. It's really mind-boggling why the memory card slot is not available to the user without removing the battery as this represents a serious hit on user-friendliness. The file manager appears as a My stuff item in the menu. It includes separate factory-preset folders for different multimedia content. You can copy or move files to the external memory or send them via Bluetooth, and for all of those options you can rely on multiple selection. However, we did notice a huge lag in folder browsing, once the memory card started to fill up. The LG plays DivX videos, but not Xvid though. The Viewty 3-inch screen is prefect for videos. Thought the internal memory does scream for an upgrade for movie files, which the average size mostly stands at 700 MB.

The Muvee studio is also a fun little program, which automatically sync pictures you have taken to preloaded MP3s. It is extremely easy to use, just click the pictures you want to put in, choose your music and the program will churn out a video.

Connectivity
As far as network connectivity is concerned, the phone features tri-band GSM (900/1800/1900 MHz), GPRS, EDGE plus HSDPA 3.6 Mbps. There is also Bluetooth 1.2 with A2DP stereo support.

Games
The only game that KU990 Viewty had was the LG Space Commando game. The game offers rich 3D graphics for a mobile phone and somehow made us think that the handset had a hardware video accelerator.

This first person shooter is amusing and offers three gaming modes - piloting a spaceship, first-person shooting on human enemies and first-person shooting on aliens sneaking up on you, crawling on the walls, etc. Trying the game out was a fun pastime - the spaceship/character is controlled by the game and all you are left with is shooting (tapping on the screen in the KU990 case).

Verdict
In conclusion, the Viewty KU 990 is a heck of a phone, snags are minimal and there are many positive things about this phone. While LG has yet to establish themselves as a major player in consumers' minds, they are constantly re-inventing their phones. Perhaps the Viewty will inspire shock and awe in people's mind, as it certainly did us.

At RM 2,099, the phone offers quite a lot pound for pound. If you want a good camera phone with cool features and a touch screen- the Viewty KU 990 is for you.

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