LG KU990 Viewty 

My mobile contract ran out the other day and so off I went into town to get a new phone. After looking at the vast array on offer I chose to go for the LG Viewty Silver.

This phone is just about as close to an iPhone as you can get barring a few details. Yes, the internal memory is only 90 Meg, but you can expand this to 2 Gig with a micro SD card, so plenty of space for photos, videos and music.

The touch screen is a good clear display, and very responsive to the touch. It takes a few minutes to get used to, but once you have you’re flying! It’s outstanding when texting, especially when using the included stylus (if you happen to lose the stylus you can simply use one of the Nintendo DS ones. I picked up a pack of 4 for a couple of pounds from my local Gamestation and they work perfectly!). Complicated text messages are typed out in a matter of seconds! If you don’t want to use the keypad, just touch the input option button at the top of the display to select either the QWERTY keyboard, or for the tech lovers the touchscreen handwriting board. The hand written option is the most impressive and at the same time, most annoying option as it will sometimes display a different letter to the one you just wrote. 

The camera is a high quality 5 Mega Pixel, with auto and manual focus options. I’ve taken several photos with it so far and am very impressed with the quality from it. There is a well-equipped editing suite included into the phone, so you can resize, colour balance, crop and generally muck about with your photos. Zooming is taken care of by either the touch screen or the jog wheel surrounding the camera lens. This also handles volume and several other functions when not being used by the camera.

Video recording quality is excellent with widescreen and 120FPS slo-mo options, as well as a front facing camera for video calling. Sound quality is impressive, both from recorded video or audio files uploaded to the phone. Videos can be viewed either with the phone held vertically or by touching the image, it switches to widescreen. When paused, there is an option to screen capture your video, so you can have a still image from your favourite recordings.

The one major gripe I have with this phone is battery life. A screen this size is very power hungry, so you really have to turn the power save option on. The first couple of days the battery lasted about 2 days! With power save on it’s now gone for 2 days and has only gone down one bar on the battery indicator.  In summary then, this is an amazing little piece of kit, let down only by power consumption and slight awkwardness of the handwriting recognition.