I have recently got an LG Viewty (aka LG KU990), courtesy of Outside Line, to review and keep.
The main features of this HSDPA (3G) mobile is the touchscreen and on-screen QWERTY keyboard. In addition to this, it boasts a 5MP camera with a proper flash and a low light setting up to ISO 800.
The phone comes with a USB lead, headphones and charger.
Dimensions and stylus: small and lipstick-like stylus
The Viewty is fairly small, much smaller than my current XDA Exec, measuring roughly 105mm x 55mm x 15mm yet it still manages to boast a 3″ screen!
I’m guessing it’s aimed at a female target audience due to it’s lipstick-like expanding stylus (to control its touchscreen). There’s no obvious place to insert the stylus in the phone so I attached via a hook on the phone. This is far from perfect… I’d rather have storage for the stylus built into the phone’s shell.
Input: an ineffective keyboard but effective touchscreen
Input can be made through the stylus, mentioned above, or through fingers on the touchscreen. There are also buttons to aid in taking photos, unlocking, quickly answering calls and quickly hanging up.
Navigating through menus, textual and numerical input is completed through the touchscreen. A variety of methods of textual input methods are provided such as standard mobile phone way (three 2 in sequence make a C), handwriting (which isn’t good for me as I form my letters irregularly) and in some circumstances a QWERTY keyboard (hence its name)
Much to my annoyance, you can only use the QWERTY keyboard in landscape mode making it impossible to do things such as enter a URL into its browser. This is a major flaw, in my opinion, and I hope LG update their firmware to allow keyboard input to be offered wherever possible.
I am impressed by the ease of locking and unlocking the phone. It requires you to press one button on the side of the phone and that’s it! This, in my opinion, is much nicer than holding * down!
The phone also vibrates when touched, but only lightly, providing nice sensual feedback. Whilst it is slightly disconcerting at first, you soon grow to love it.
Scrolling is achieved by moving the stylus up, down and across the screen. You move the stylus in the opposite direction to the one in which you wish to move… as if you’re pulling it.
Surrounding the camera lens there is a jog wheel which is used to control music, zoom in and out of photos and webpages.
I do find my hardware keyboard in my XDA Exec much quicker to type on than this one which requires lots of tapping. However, for the average Joe they won’t want to carry about such bulk!
Connectivity: fast 3G!
The phone is armed with 3G (HSDPA allowing speeds up to 3.6Mbps… faster than my DSL!) and although I live in an area of marginal 3G coverage it will often pick up the signal. 3G allows you to do all sorts and I’ve been enjoying T-Mobile’s ability to watch live TV for only £1/daily. Obviously, 3G coverage needs to rapidly be expanded inside the United Kingdom.
Also, it has Bluetooth which was very quick and easy to set-up with my Mac. The phone also comes with a USB connectivity cable and driver disc for Windows; neither LG or iSync support the Viewty on OS X 
. I’m not sure about Linux but if LG are like most companies, Linux support is their last priority.
The phone doesn’t possess infrared.
Phone’s OS/software: Simple interface, lots of tools
The phone has an email client, which I admit I haven’t used, a browser which despite my initial concerns is actually very good - perfectly rendering this blog. My only complaint with the browser is the one I mentioned above… that URLs cannot be inputted via QWERTY.
The menu is very well designed with shortcuts on the standby screen (ie the screen with the wallpaper etc) to messaging, phone, the main menu and contacts. The main menu is split into four sub-categories: a phone menu (with contacts, logs, dialling & messaging), media (’my stuff’ (a file browser), camera, MuVee studio (a primitive video editor), music, video playlists, voice recorder, FM radio and Games & Apps), an organiser menu (browser, organiser, alarms, memo, tools and USIM services) and then settings.
One interesting feature is that the phone supports Flash and can open some SWFs, but they have to be very small in terms of filesize. It can also handle Java applications.
Camera and video: 5MP and DivX
One of the phone’s main features is its 5MP camera which has a proper flash (not a lousy LED like my old phone’s camera). You can also use the phone’s front camera which is normally used for video calling to do photos, but these are at a much lower resolution.
The main flaw of this camera, in my opinion, is the lack of an optical zoom (effectively ruling it out as a fully blown replacement to my digital camera) and the fact that there’s no lens cover of any sort. This might make the lens susceptible to damage.
The phone can ‘achieve’ low-light up to ISO 800, has a macro mode and allows images to manually focused.
The phone takes good quality photographs but it won’t replace my S3 IS any time soon!
The camera can also record videos straight as a DivX or 3GP at a rate of up to 120FPS. The fact that files are DivXs saves a lot of effort if you want to share them, especially online, as most people now probably have the codecs on their computers if not DVD players!
Conclusion
Whilst the lack of Macintosh support and the inconsistency of where the keyboard can and cannot be used grows annoying, the phone has a supreme camera and good 3G ability.
It’d be amazing if the phone auto-rotated like the iPhone but I wonder if the K990 has the necessary hardware to ever facilitate such a feature (if I’m not mistaken, the Nokia N95 now auto-rotates).
In essence, the phone still very much feels like a phone despite its touchscreen. I’ve grown unaccustomed to phones and this mobile is right in between a ‘phone’ and a ’smartphone’. Smartphones aren’t practical for everyone and I have a feeling that this phone’s style and pricetag (£350 on T-Mobile as PAYG, free on O2 with a contract; compare that with the £280 for the iPhone on contract) will lure in quite a big audience.
Tags: lg viewty, viewty, phone, review, ku990, lg, mobile phones, iphone
Nice entry - I too have the Viewty and currently exploring it with OSX - As for the lack of OSX support what is needed? My Contacts exported nicely into the phone and I have written a short program to “sync” (although this is more of a copy) my iCal to the phone in one command. Would you like to test it?
The “mass storage” get a bit confused when ejecting, but aside that not had too many other problems.
P
I’m Mac user too, can you please tell me how to use it with the usb cable?
I attached it to the MacBook pro but it just started to charge the battery and I saw nothing changing on Mac, I saw no new icon to show the phone.
if you could please reply through my e-mail I would be very glad to you.
Thanks
you might be amused with my non technical iPhone Oyster hack over at rashbre central. I’m sure it would work with one of these too.
Smiles. rashbre.
First gadget review I’ve seen from you Joe. You seem to have done a good job of it.
Thanks for the review Joe. Although I would point out that we don’t consider the Viewty a challenger to the iPhone due to its focus on the camera and video elements.
http://www.lgblog.co.uk/2007/10/15/viewty-the-buzz-is-building/
@p i would love to test your ical “syncing” program. i’m quite disappointed with the 990, because it only supports 100 calendar entrys. as well as the missing sync with my mac.
Fantastic review. Technical info. very helpful. It seems to be more of a camera than some others and this is what I’m looking for.
The Iphone is nothing to live upto and the sooner people realise this the better apple products are way over-rated and over-hyped and are often just style over function for example the Iphone claims to be good at internet browsing and yes it has wifi but to be honest if ur in a area of wifi ur more than likely at home or work where u could probably use a computer instead which of course is much better and since the Iphone has no 3G then wanting to view the web anywhere more “mobile” is gonna be painful. Then theres the terrible camera and comon using it as a mp3 player? for a start ipods have bad sound quality next to alot of other mp3 players.
This phone however delivers a good camera a amazing 120fps video recording, 3G etc etc
Iphone can’t even do basic functions like copy and paste or foward text messages or delete contacts without a computer.
The basic iCal2Viewty for OSX can be found:
http://ical2viewty.blogspot.com/
Pat
I have LG viewty and I think it is an iPhone Killer. It just does so much more. I have mine on ‘3′ and I think it’s the best package deal in UK. £35 per month gives you: FREE LG Viewty, 700 mixed text or minutes, 1GB a month internet, Free acess to Skype, Ebay, MSN and Facebook. £5 to spend on whatever you want in ‘3′ shop + more, 24h of TV is only £0.49.
There is rumour that LG is working on iSync solution.
I find the Bluetooth File Exchange NOT working correctly with Viewty. You can’t see the files or folders - so it is impossible to take the files of the phone this way. You can however send them to it.
Check out my little LG VIEWTY DOWNLOADS page:
http://www.tvpav.com/pages/lgviewty.htm
By the way the LG VIEWTY does auto-rotate..
Hi.. I am new to this blog thing.. I just bought Viewty locked to Orange.. Initially wasn’t aware that Skype feature comes with the service provider and can not be downloaded later on (which I was told by three customer care)..
Is there any way to download skype on my phone and use it.. I can get the phone unlocked anytime .. so there is no problem with that..
Please let me know if u have any solution to my problem.
Thanks
great review i also have a viewty i think it excellent and does everythink i neeed it to the iphone is too overrated and isnt so great as claimed any way the viewty is great thnx cya
akum u mentioned you can get the lg viewty unlocked any time can i ask how please because i have been searching for about a week and no success, even if any of you can help me that would be great its currently locked on t-mobile
How on earth can you get the viewty to lock automatically but request a pin to be entered in order to get the handset unlocked?
Good comments on the handset so far.. one thing that drives me mad is the fact the there is no delete (backspace) when sending a text.. what on earth is that all about?
RB
Rudebor. To delete a character when texting etc. just hit the little ‘c’ button between the phone up/down buttons on the bottom of the screen!
Does anyone know how to increase calender entries above 100. It’s driving me mad!!!!
Chanka - That tip on deleting in texts should be written in very large letters as it’s the most annoying thing about the Viewty so far not knowing that.
My friend just got one and when they make a call, the stylus rattles off the phone causing the call-receiver to be deafened by loud crashing noises which also obscures the voice of the Viewty user!
The viewty auto rotates??? how? also how do you set it to record video as divx as opposed to QT?
I don’t really like it when you can’t download anything onto it without the internet on it, and there is hardly any games
have games on my old micro card but can not get them on to my viewty could anybody help me thanx
could somebody tell me why i cant watch videos from tube?…do i have to dowload some kind of flashplayer for the phone? or something else is happening?… sorry for that noob! :P… hopefully somebdy could help!
I like this phone overall, but the only problem I am having is that I have got a quick access menu on the main screen of my phone that I dont want there and cant get rid of it.
I managed to put it there by accident when I was cleaning my screen.
Anyone help?
Thanks
Tamsin
Swipe across the phone just between the quick access screen and the four icons at the bottom. That will turn the quick access screen back off.