Viewty: aVoid (LG KU990 Viewty)

Member Name: The Duke

Product:	LG KU990 Viewty
Date:	22/11/08 (564 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Decent sized phone, does calls and text messages adequately

Disadvantages: Really doesn't live up to hype, LG support non-existant

Alarm bells should have been ringing. When I last upgraded my phone from a Nokia to the Sony Ericsson K800i (which had been on the market around a year at this stage), I had to haggle to get the handset cost down to what I thought was a reasonable price from well over £100. This time, the operator was offering a new phone, only on the market for six months, for £30. As the Viewty was something I had been considering as an upgrade, I took the offer without too much thought.

I wish I hadn't bothered...

Rather worryingly, when launched, the Viewty was LG's flagship phone, promised lots and yet it failed to live up to my expectations right from the moment the battery charged and I was able to play around with it. On paper, the Viewty looks like a great phone, but somewhere along the way, this failed to translate from design to product.

Where to start?

It's a good sized phone which isn't too heavy, but still feels solid enough in my hand. The back cover doesn't fit as snugly as it might, so when the phone vibrates, the back cover can rattle if it's sitting on a hard surface. The screen is big and all the fonts and icons are clear and readable in all lighting conditions.

As a phone, it tends to be OK. It's possible to do the things you would normally do without too much hassle, although sometimes the operating system and touch screen can cause issues. For example, sometimes, after I've finished making a call, the phone software freezes meaning I don't actually hang up until twenty or thirty seconds later. I also found that I had to slow my texting down a little as the phone didn't want to keep up with me. Apart from these issues, which seems to be related to the speed of the operating system (and is too slow), basic phone functions - making and receiving calls or text messages was fine.

The interface:

There are three options for sending text messages - handwriting, keypad and keyboard. Despite having a touch screen, the keypad is still the easiest to use, but I have real problems with the predictive text offering up some weird combinations. Trying to add an apostrophe and an 's' onto the end of words gives me an automatic '17', for example.

Handwriting recognition is good for impressing the nerds, but it can be so temperamental that it's not really worth bothering with and I often spend some time trying to get the phone to recognise letters. I'm not 100% sure if this is a problem with the screen or the actual recognition software, but it's not foolproof.

The operation of the phone isn't consistent throughout the various features, so scrolling through a list of text messages uses a different technique to scrolling through a list of photos, just as one example. I found that really annoying and extremely poor design.

There are screen protectors in the box to help keep the screen scratch free, but I found the touch screen interface to be much more responsive when I was changing the covers, that I ended up not bothering to stick on the second one. In its favour, the screen is holding up well to not having any protection, even after a few months. It hasn't improved the handwriting recognition though.

Camera:

Contrary to popular belief, the Viewty is not an iPhone rival. The camera is meant to be THE selling point of the Viewty, but it simply doesn't cut the mustard. It's a 5 MP camera, but I got better quality pictures from my old K800i which was only 3 MP. I've had a look at the files on my PC and it seems that whatever compression is used on the images, this reduces the picture quality. The file sizes for the Viewty's photos are a fraction of the size of similar pictures from my K800i, despite supposedly having a lot more information in them. Pictures in low light are also very poor. The flash isn't bad, but I found you have to do a bit of trial and error to find the optimal distance from your subject or else the flash washes out the image or doesn't light it up enough.

The video camera can be quite good, with an option to take video at 120 frames per second, but you can only play back at 30 fps, giving you the chance to video things in slow motion.

PC Connectivity:

The LG software is nothing special, but is sadly lacking in capabilities. Compared to what I was able to do with various pieces of software with the K800i, the LG PC Suite can do the basic set up and basic file maintenance. On other phones, having that extra functionality is a luxury, but with the LG's operating software being less than intuitive, extra functionality in the software is a must.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that all phone software should be as complete as the "MyPhoneExplorer" application for the Sony Ericsson K-series phones - make and receive calls while controlling your phone through your PC, send text messages etc. That's proper phone management.

A few months after installing the LG PC Suite, it simply stopped working. It will boot up and look to be running OK, but when I try to synchronise with my PC, it fails to connect to the phone. Un-installing and reinstalling the software has not resolved the issue.

Support:

Even with the phone being sub-par, LG could have improved the overall performance with updates to the phone in the form of firmware updates, but to the best of my knowledge, LG have never released any updates to improve the phone performance or increase image quality etc.

Apple do it, Sony Ericsson do it and apparently LG have done it for a small number of their phones, but not for a phone that was, at one time, their flagship product.

Memory expansion:

Despite the phone hardware being able to take 8GB memory cards, the phone cannot write any more than 2GB. If you want to use a bigger memory card to its full potential, you need to add all your software, music etc. to the card before inserting it into the phone. (This is one of those issues that could be easily fixed with a firmware upgrade.)

Overall:

I have to say that I'm a greatly disappointed in the Viewty, even having paid a paltry £30 for it. I try not to let single incidents colour my view and will often give the benefit of the doubt, but in this case, the poor quality of the Viewty coupled with LG's complete lack of support for the phone has really made me question whether I'd ever buy an LG Phone ever again. I've stopped using the Viewty and am back with my K800i, which doesn't have as big a screen, but is a better phone in almost every department and is much easier to use thanks to the third party software.

Summary: Should have been a good phone, but falls far short.

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