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The LG KU990 Viewty has a ton of goodies packed in a very small space. There is the 3” touch screen with it’s 240 x 400resolution, the stereo Bluetooth and an absolutely amazing 5 megapixel camera that can take video at 120fps! Full of features, the LG KU990 set off a round of oohs and ahhhs when I opened the box. |
Things I like:
- A 5 megapixel camera, with autofocus and image stabilization
- Haptic Feedback when the screen is pushed
- DivX Video
- TV-Out support
- QVGA video at 120 fps
- VGA video at 30 fps
- A 3 inch 262k display touch screen with 200 by 400 resolution
- Camera strobe flash
Things that disappointed me
- Lacked a hot swap memory ability
- Did not like the stylus dongle
- Slow file management when memory get taxed
- The zoom wheel gets in the lens’s way
When the LG KU990 was announced recently it did not cause the stir seen with the Samsung G600 or the Sony Erickson K850 in the mobile device community. However, it is quite a sophisticated phone that impressed me and surely rates more attention than it has been getting.
The KU990 Viewty is not LG’s first attempt at a 5 megapixel camera phone, but it shares none of the shortcomings seen by their previous attempt the LG KG920 such as the high price, the highly unusual swivel design and the very slow camera interface.
Appearances
Roughly the size of Apple’s iPhone, the LG KU990 weighs in at 112 g, relatively light given its features. Looking at the design, comparisons with the LG Prada phone are inevitable; they share the same flash UI, the same form factor and large screen but Prada had no input into this project.
Looking at the front panel, you see only three hardware keys: the End/Send keys and the Correction C key that is used for backspacing or for moving up one level in the menu. The top right corner sports the secondary VGA camera for video calls and the left side is where you will find the universal port for the charger/data/headset, similar to the one used by Samsung. They very cleverly hid this one under a sliding panel.
A glance at the top and bottom of the headset will show no controls, but notice the microphone pinhole at the bottom, while the top is where you will find back cover release button and the wrist strap eyelet.
Most of the controls are on the left side of the camera, with the camera shutter key, the key lock button (this doubles as the button to take pictures with image stabilization) and a function slider key that changes the camera from still to video to image gallery.
When you look at the rear of the LG Ku990, it looks like a true digital camera. The 5 megapixel lens sports a Schneider-Kreuznach optics and has a jog-wheel that is used to control the digital zoom. You can also use it for exposure compensation or for brightness, zooming in on gallery images or for controlling the volume. Near the camera lens (which amazingly has no protective cover at all) is the strobe flash the loudspeaker and the focus assist.
If you remove the back panel, you find the 1000mAh Li-Ion battery, under which are the SIM card slot and the microSD memory card slot. The company provided no data on battery life, but I could average about 2 days on a charge. Luckily, the DivX playback does not seem to exert ay strain on the battery, as I watched a 2 hour DivX movie after a full day of use.
The LG KU990 is easy to hold and quite comfortable in the hand and quite usable. However, it is worth noting that the LG KU990 has a more generous touch screen interface than does the LG Prada phone. While the Prada only accepted finger touch, the KU990 will let you use finger, stylus or even a pen. The display shows well in sunlight, still falling short of the standard set by Nokia.
The LG KU990 Viewty has a unique stylus dongle that just dangles along the handset and does not plug in anywhere. I did not like the idea of my stylus just dangling there all the time.
Texting is Easier
With this phone you can send and receive SMS, MMS and email. One thing I did not like about the Prada was the different editors for each type of message, while with the KI990 it is much simpler. Just click the attachment icon. The actual typing of messages is much easier now that LG has added haptics to provide feedback on each key press.
A pleasant surprise is handwriting recognition. You can input text with the stylus or you can edit typed text. Unfortunately, the handwriting recognition falls short of what we have seen with Windows Pocket PC. There is a variety of input methods: QWERTY, keypad, handwriting on the screen or in the box.
If you choose to input with the QWERTY keyboard, the interface switches to landscape mode, invoking a resemblance to the Apple iPhone. Overall, I liked the QWERTY keyboard and got good with it really quickly. One downside is that this is not always an option to enter text with throughout the phone.
If email is your thing, then the LG KU990 really shines. It supports both POP3 and IMAP4 protocols. The maximum incoming attachment size is 400 KB for incoming mail. You can program the phone to auto retrieve you r mail at regular intervals, with a separate option if you are roaming. I tried to set it up with my gmail account but could not, so I assume the LG KU990 can’t support SSL Encryption.
Going Portable
Included in the box is a LG USB cable to use with the USB high speed storage feature on the phone. When plugged in to a PC, the KU990 shows only the memory card and not the internal memory, unlike the Prada phone which made both drives available.
As far as connectivity goes, the phone has Bluetooth 1.2 with A2DP stereo support and triband GSM/GPRS/EDGE plus HSDPA 3.6 Mbps.
Time management
The Calendar is pretty much what you would expect; weekly and monthly views and you can navigate the dates by finger. The orange square indicates today’s date. Touching a date opens a pop-up so you can see what is under your finger. You can choose the first day of the week, unlike the Prada phone. Also, you can choose the default view, weekly or monthly. It is quite simple to add an event, and there is room for up to 100 calendar events. There is a separate application for tasks and it too can store up to 100 items. However, it will only let you store 5 memos and the alarm clock feature has 5 alarm slots, instead of Prada’s one.
The world time application in the Prada phone was much nicer, I was surprised to see it downgraded in the LG KU990 Viewty.
The LG KU990phone has support for Java MDIP 2, s you can load your own Java based applications. I installed Opera’s minibrowser and it worked without a hitch.
Get your game on
The only game the LG KU990 Viewty had preinstalled was the LG Space Commando game. The graphics are a rich 3D that is better than I expected for a mobile phone made me suspect a video accelerator like in the Nokia N95. The game is fun and has 3 modes: spaceship pilot, first person shooting on humans and first person shooting on aliens. Controls were done by tapping on the screen.
One nice feature with the games application is the large virtual keys placed at the bottom of the screen; while they do cost you some screen real estate, they do have two positive effects. In the first place, it lets the games work in standard resolution and in the second, potential problems with the touch sensitive navigation in any of the new games are dealt with by having additional controls available.
The Camera
I was utterly unimpressed by the first 5 megapixel LG camera phone, the KG920, with its lackluster performance. However, the KU 990 Viewty is impressive from the beginning.
In standard ratio the camera uses most of the display a s a viewfinder; in full screen it uses even more. The maximum picture resolution is 2592 X 1944pixels.
The camera is controlled by four hardware keys. The first is a slider that sets camera mode – photo, video, gallery, just like on any digicam. I was amazed by the gallery application powered by this switch; all my images and videos are seen as a shuffled deck of pictures. Touch any of them to bring it to the front, touch it again to get the image information.
The second camera key is the jog wheel located on the back. It controls the digital zoom. On the right side is the shutter key and the fourth is the lock/unlock key, which also controls the image stabilization mode. This sounds more impressive than it is, as it just cannot compare with the mechanical optical stabilization seen in even low end digital cameras.
The camera uses a strobe flash, which comes in somewhere between the xenon flash used by the Sony Ericsson K800 and a standard LED flash. There is also a focus assist light that does a great job except in macro shots. Unfortunately, because of location, it lights up the subject just off to the side instead of the center.
The interface on the camera has extensive settings. There are several presets (beach, party, portrait, night, landscape) plus there are special shooting modes (frames, panorama and continuous). The continuous mode is similar to the best-pic mode used by Sony Ericsson in their Cyber-shot handsets, while the panorama mode takes several images and stitches them together. Sony Ericsson has a similar mode but can only use up to three shots and uses the 640x480 resolution, while the LG uses 1 megapixel for a higher resolution.
The LG KU990 comes equipped with a timer and for those hard to capture situations, you can manual focus. Most camera phones have a white balance but Viewty also has a color tone option that you can use to adjust the color in your pictures (or use it to make sepia tones, black and white or photo negatives)The ISO is also adjustable, from 100-800. One thing I did not like was I could not turn the shutter sound off. The camera was supposed to offer face recognition, but this was cancelled in pre-production.
When it comes to speed and performance, I was quite pleased by the LG KU990. At full 5 megapixel resolution, shot to shot time was about 4 seconds- the same as with the Sony Ericsson K850.
VGA flavor
For all the novelty of the 120 fps, most people will use the VGA video capture at 30 fps. The DivX compression ensures that the video files do not hog your memory. It appears that at the highest setting, 1 hour of video equals 1 GB of memory. In addition to the VGA videos, the LG K990 can also record movies in a 640x384 resolution with a 16:9 aspect ratio.
The camera was not perfect: The noise levels were a bit high and sometimes there was strange color dithering. The camera has no lens cover and no macro mode when recording movies. This could be helpful during slow motion work.
In summary…
In an age where manufactures tend to reuse platforms and interfaces, LG decided to pave their own path. With every new release, they improve the interface, making it more user friendly and more enjoyable. It is obvious they listen to user feedback and that they are dedicated to innovation. This has been a constant theme since the LG Chocolate and the LG KU990 Viewty continues that tradition.
Jam packed with high tech features, the LG KU990 is nothing short of impressive. It balances style with function and should be a massive success for LG.
  
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