LG KU990 Viewty Review – Camera Phones at Their Finest

With a solid reputation as LG’s best phone yet, the KU990 Viewty is LG’s foray into the high-technology camera phone market.  Boasting over 7.5 cm of touch screen space, this Viewty finally brings the promise of touch screen heaven into reality.

 Out of the box the phone includes a USB cable, a stylus pen, the LG PC Suite as well as its own DivX converter.    The easy interaction with the phone using the touch screen means that even the most resistant techno-phobe can jump right in and begin using the highly intuitive interface.  The 262 thousand color screen displaying at a 240 x 400 pixel resolution features a home page with animated arrows running along the bottom edge.  Simply run your finger along them and you’ll get a 3 X 3 bank of icons popping up that offer you access to an impressive array of built in features and utilities.  You can bring up your internet browser, or perhaps do a bit of instant messages, set up and manage profiles, as well as your games and any other installed applications.  You also have memo functions, alarms, a My Stuff storage area, your customized calendar, and your Blue Tooth settings.  If you sweep your finger along the animated arrows again they disappear from view.  All in all, it’s a beautiful and highly intuitive and user friendly way to interact with your new mobile phone.

 You can customize the look and feel of your touch screen interaction even further with three built-in themes.  The Black theme features a simple black background.  The Silver theme is light grey with animated graphics, but our favorite theme is Fish.  The Fish theme features an animated goldfish that swims towards your fingertip when you touch the screen.  The slightest bit useful?  Probably not.  Charming?  Absolutely!  Themes are going to be predictably popular so we’re confident we’ll have some cool themes to look forward to for add-ons in the near future.

 The beauty of the screen makes photo management more fun than it would be otherwise, but this is one area that we’re looking forward to seeing a bit of improvement.  The incredibly powerful camera functions make picture taking a breeze, but there’s still a bit of work left to be done in using the KU990 Viewty to view and manage them.  Although during our review were able to easily pull up our sample photos and use the touch screen to slide them around until we were able to view the part of the picture we wanted to focus on, pulling them got a big sluggish at times.  We don’t consider this much of a drawback since most people will probably prefer to use their PC to manage their photos for the most part anyway, but if you plan on making extensive use of the phone to manage them it’s sure to become a bit tedious at times.

Touch screen technology has been making us promises for a long time that the LG KU990 delivers on beautifully.  If this edition is this easy to use and this powerful, we can’t wait to see how LG improves on it for next years design, but in the meantime, we’re making good use of all the capabilities that it offers us.