A sleek phone with digital camera?

A phone slapped onto the back of a digital camera is how one can describe Viewty, LG’s latest touch screen phone.

Viewty KU990. Hmm. I'm thinking a pair of binoculars, a fancy pair of sunglasses, maybe even a digital picture frame, but certainly not a feature-rich camera phone! Then again, from the folks that gave us the Shine and the Chocolate, I'm not really that taken aback by their queer nomenclature.

Rants about names aside, the Viewty KU990 is LG's successor to the iPhone-challenging Prada touch screen phone. Only this time, LG has balanced style and features in equal measure to create what is somewhat of a rarity in the mobile phone market – a feature-packed phone that actually manages to look stylish, in a rather understated sense. Measuring in at about the size of an iPhone or a HTC Touch, the Viewty shares the same form factor as the Prada, and ends up looking rather classy. The façade is minimalistic, dominated in large part by the 3 inch LCD display. Like the Prada or the Touch, it has a bare minimum of three mechanical keys – the green and red Send/End keys and the correction C key, which can be used either as a backspace key or for going one level up in the interface menu. Around the rest of the camera, you'd find a smattering of dedicated camera buttons, nothing too crowded. On the whole, the design is clean and appealing, which is not something I would say too often about most LG phones.

It's when you flip it around and activate the camera function that the device really comes into its own. You'd be forgiven to believe this looks like a real digital camera, since it really is like a phone slapped onto the back of a digital camera (or is it the other way round?). The 5 megapixel shooter is blessed with Schneider-Kreuznach optics, and with the camera activated via the dedicated camera buttons, the entire 3 inch LCD functions as an electronic viewfinder allowing you to compose your shots without squinting. Apart from the strobe flash, I quite liked a couple of handy cam-phone innovations. First, the hardware jog dial around the lens, which not only controls the digital zoom, but can also be used for setting the exposure compensation and brightness, as well as for zooming on pictures in the gallery, on office documents and web pages, as well as for controlling the volume. In actual use, it's interesting to work with, but I find a standard jog dial on the side more easy to use. The Viewty also features digital image stabilisation, and while it may sound like a hot feature, all it does is zoom into the picture and use the spare pixels to compensate for camera/hand shake. It just cannot match up to the optical image stabilization found in some cameras, but it helps images shot in dimly lit conditions – parties, dinners, etc. – a slight bit. And the results are sharp and rich in color and don't suffer from noise and chromatic aberration as much as other camphones do. In many situations, the images are far better than any other camera I have come across. That said, it's no replacement for a real camera, and you should keep that in mind.

On the video end of things, the phone can boast of the ability to upload videos directly to YouTube, and to shoot video at 120 frames per second. While this does allow you to slow it down and watch your kid perfect his tennis serve it in slow-motion, the low resolution capture means it's not going to be useful for much more.

At the end of the day, it is a phone, right? As a phone, the Viewty is rather easy to use, especially when you compare it to other touch screen phones. Icons are finger friendly and most tasks, such as dialing and messaging work via a numeric or alphabetic keypad that works identically to a standard mobile phone keypad minus the mechanical keys. And unlike other touch screen phones, the three-inch LCD is set to vibrate when you press and on-screen button, which gives you far more tactile feedback (that you have actually pressed the onscreen keys) than with standard displays. There's even a slide-in menu a la the HTC Touch, which to be honest works more reliably and responsively than the Touch. Also, when using the QWERTY keyboard, the screen changes orientation to landscape mode, which makes the keyboard really easy for finger use. And yes, there is a stylus, but I found myself using my fingers a lot more than the stylus.

On the multimedia front, the phone has a few tricks up its sleeve. The in-camera photo editing application is one of the most featured in the phones in its class. You can add text, morph images etc. and the large screen really helps here. And if you are a movie buff, you'd be pleased to know that the Viewty supports the DivX format out of the box, which means you can store movies on the microSD card and watch them on your ride to work.

Downsides? For a camera phone to not have a protective cover over the lens is just not acceptable, and battery life can be short if you end up playing with the phone as much as I did. It's also missing Wi-Fi, which is far more useful than the 3G features that are packed into this phone. And much as LG would like to claim – this is not a smartphone. Try a Windows Mobile or a Symbian device if third party applications matters that much. It may not even have the milti-touch of the iPhone, but what it lacks in gimmicky jazz, it makes up in the features department.

Quick Specs-

Network Support: EDGE, HSDPA 3.6, 900/1800/1900/2100

Display: 240 x 400 3-inch WQVGA 262K color TFT LCD touchscreen

Messaging: SMS/EMS/MMS/Email

Camera: 5.0 megapixel, CMOS Autofocus, Manual Focus, Face Tracking with Xenon flash, image
stabilisation

Memory: 100MB internal + expandability upto 2GB MicroSD

Data Connectivity: Infrared, USB, Bluetooth

Audio Support: MP3/AAC/WMA, FM Radio

Video Support: MPEG4, WMV, DivX, H.263/264

Video Encoding: VGA 30fps, QVGA 120fps

Document Support: TXT, PDF, DOC, PPT, XLS

Others: Full web browsing, stylus, jog-wheel, , speakerphone, 3.5mm stereo headphone adapter

Battery Times (Standby/Talk): 434 hours/355 minutes

Dimensions (L x W x D): 103.5 x 54.4 x 14.8 mm

Weight with battery: 112gm

Rating: 8/10

Price: Rs. 21,900/-



Tushar Kanwar