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Whilst the rest of the electronics industry fumbles around deciding what to do about the iPhone, LG has quietly gone ahead and done something rather special. The KU990 or Viewty as it’s most commonly referred to, rides on the touchscreen phenomenon and has no physical keypad or slide out keyboard. In fact, apart from the three buttons on the front and the two on the side there aren’t any other buttons you can push.

Inside the slim form factor you get a fully featured 3G multimedia phone with a built-in 5 megapixel camera. The 3-inch touchscreen has a resolution of 240 x 400 and supports up to 262k colours.

One of the key features of the Viewty is its impressive camera functionality. You might think that the fact that this phone has a 5 megapixel camera is the end of the story but you would be very wrong. When you start to break down the specification of the camera portion of this phone, you start to wonder where they actually put the phone. Lets start with the Schneider Kreuznach lens, well known in the world of digital photography and often featured on Kodak cameras. You then look at the ISO 800 support for low-light photography, and when that can’t hack it, the Xenon flash will help brighten things up.

Is that all? Not quite. LG clearly wanted to make this the most complete camera phone to date so they’ve also put in an image stabiliser - a feature that is often reserved for higher end digital cameras. On paper, it reads like you’ve got a pretty decent digital camera on your hands. I’m forgetting that the Viewty also has an incredible 120 fps video mode that will allow you to capture action sequences in high speed so that you can then play back in slow motion and see everything happen in detail - my £300+ Canon PowerShot S3 doesn’t even have that!

With such a high resolution camera built-in, memory will always be an issue so you can make sure you have enough room by adding up to 2GB of flash memory using the micro-SD card slot beneath the battery.

Physical Design

The Viewty is small and light enough to rest in the palm of your hands. It’s quite incredible just how light the whole package weighs in at, just 112g. The 3-inch screen dominates the majority of the front fascia leaving room for just three buttons below the screen: call, hang up and clear. At the side of the device (what makes up the top of the camera when you turn it landscape) features a three point switch for selecting photography, video and playback modes, shoot button (which also activates the camera) and the image stabiliser (which doubles as the lock/unlock button for the phone).

On the opposite side to the camera buttons is the data port, which is used for connecting to your PC via USB as well as charging and connecting the headset to. Unfortunately this means the Viewty doesn’t use a standard 3.5mm jack for your own headphones however the adapter cable that comes with it is a halfway solution. The handsfree kit plugs in to the data port and the other end offers a 3.5mm jack for you to plug in your headphones of choice - quite a reasonable compromise I would say, as long as you don’t lose that cable.

Turn the Viewty around to face downwards and you will find that the entire underneath of the phone has been styled, designed and achieves the look of a genuine camera. So convincing is the design that if you didn’t know any better you would think that this was a camera since the opposite side offers few clues that this is a phone.

LG have come up with a design that is minimal and effective. Placing just enough buttons to make it work in the right places and taking away the clutter. Buttons are so 2007 right? This year is going to be a test for designers in the challenge to create products, which have few, or better yet, no buttons. Just how far can they take the minimalist approach?

Camera

Whilst there’s no optical zoom on the Viewty, the jog dial around the lens does allow you to operate the digital zoom to get a close up on the shot.

Software settings will allow you to customise nearly every function that you would find on a digital camera with access to white balance, panoramic shots, presets (portrait, landscape, night, beach, sport, party), red-eye reduction, ISO settings, colour tones, self-timer, macro mode, manual and auto focus, and the list goes on. There are simply a ton of features that you can spend all day playing with before and after you take the shot to get the right picture.

One of the fun features that are included in the editing aspect of the software is the ability to frame your pictures with a number of cartoon-type picture frames and a range of rubber stamp images to ‘customise’ your pictures before you post them on to Facebook or send them to your friends.

The 5 megapixel resolution creates some really large and clear shots, as long as you’re in good lighting conditions. As with all high ISO cameras, the darker the environment, the higher the ISO resulting in more image ‘noise’. This comes out as horrible bits of colour all over your picture - so you have to resort to flash or just take your shot in good light. I found the camera on the Viewty to do what all other cameras do when the flash is off - take nasty pictures. Whilst images came out clear, colour reproduction isn’t on par with a dedicated camera of equivalent spec. However, it’s important not to forget that this is a camera phone after all, so don’t expect high end quality, this solution is far from it.

Sometimes I read specifications and feature lists and they’re often over promised and end up doing nothing more than disappoint me when I come to find them and use them. I thought this would be the case with the high speed video capture - a gimmick if you will to help sell the thing. How wrong was I. After playing around with the feature in various experimental videos, I discovered that on every occasion it worked as described. It captures your recordings in ultra high speed and then plays it back in a smooth flowing motion that allows you to see every ounce of detail. I can’t imagine there being many scenarios where you would actually need to use this, but it’s still a testament to the capabilities of the Viewty.

There’s all this and I haven’t even mentioned the front-facing camera. You can use this for video-calling others with 3G handsets, that’s not all though. When you’re in the camera mode you can switch to the front-facing camera for taking self portrait shots. This will limit the resolution and functions but the option is there for when you need it.

Messaging

In order to minimise the size and weight of the Viewty, LG have opted out of including a hardware keypad or keyboard. Not even one that hides behind the screen and slides out. They’ve gone down the brave route of using an on-screen input system. In my experience of gadgets, this solution can either go horrible wrong or they come close to being a good good alternative to a physical keypad.

The last couple of weeks I’ve been using the Viewty, I’ve had a chance to tap out my text messages using various on-screen keyboards and I can tell you now that whilst I definitely can’t type as quickly as I can using a physical keypad, I am able to tap out messages relatively quickly and accurately. I think it helps that each time you hit a button you get a slight rumble that lets you know you hit a key. This is meant to provide you with tactile feedback using the vibrating motor and it goes some way to help you ‘feel’ for the keys.

Whenever the situation calls for you to enter characters in to the Viewty, you can have the option to use a numbered keypad system (press the 2 key twice for the letter b) with or without T9 predictive text, a full QWERTY keyboard or handwriting recognition. Personally I stayed away from handwriting recognition since I didn’t have the stylus for it (nor would I choose to carry it with me even if it did come with one) and trying to write things with your finger nail just didn’t work for me. It’s been a long time since I could write by hand quicker than I can type or press a few buttons anyway.

Web Browser

With the Java-based web browser, you can access the ‘real’ web with the ability to view web-pages you would normally see on your desktop, as well as WAP content designed to fit on the Viewty screen. The browser allows you to switch between landscape and portrait mode depending on the formatting of the web page and you can also open up new windows for tabbed browsing.

Web pages display properly but there are sometimes issues in performance when you are trying to move about a graphic intensive page. WAP formatted sites like the default homepage provided by Three work smoothly and moving about the page is as simple as a flick of the finger on the screen.

Access times are quick since data transfer goes over the 3G network and the menu options allow you to send links by e-mail or text message as well as save the web-page for offline viewing and access to your bookmarks.

It’s a good thing that LG has implemented shortcuts for the common prefixes to web-addresses such as ‘www’ to save you from having to type it out and it’s also a good thing that this handset has access to the full size keyboard because it’s not often that T9 predictive text will actually recognise the web address you’re trying to type in and makes web address input less tedious.

Three

The 3G network provided by Three offers a broadband speed connection to the internet and it’s own internal services. Because 3 owns and operates the 3G license they are able to dish up live TV content straight to your mobile phone for 49p/day. So you can now get access to your favourite TV shows from the BBC or MTV or keep the kids occupied with Nickelodeon wherever you are.

Three also have special access to Windows Live Messenger and Skype so you can keep in touch via IM and VOIP when you’re on the move. Skype calling and IM’ing is available as long as you top up at least £10/month when you’re on pay as you go or the service is included on a pay monthly contract.

Gripes

There seems to be an element of polish to the user interface that doesn’t appear to have made the cut. Whilst there are clearly references to the iPhone with the design of the handset and the user interface experience, menus show laggy animations for example.

Some icons and buttons in the UI are simply too small to be useful, especially when you want quick access and you’re not sitting down comfortably to click on it. The top row set of icons for example which allow you to switch between applications and select different sound profiles are tiny in comparison to the others you find throughout the software, which makes quick access to what you would assume, frequently accessed menus, rather difficult.

On a few occasions when I was on the move, I found it difficult to hit the right button unless I stopped and precision tapped the button. Fortunately this didn’t affect the most common applications on this handset which are, calling and messaging - these were easy to use stationary and on the move.

My home screen has been set up to show the time and a calendar (can be removed) and Three have added the 3 launcher and Planet 3 buttons which makes the home screen rather cluttered. A feature which LG have implemented, is a quick access menu, which you can get to by swiping your finger left or right across the bottom of the home screen. It’s difficult to get the swipe right to activate this quick access menu, which renders it useless since it is quicker (and less frustrating) to get to your application via the menu system.

Battery life is limited with about three days usage if you don’t make any calls and about two days if you do a lot of web browsing. It’s adequate but a day or two extra capacity wouldn’t have hurt especially with so many features ripe for ‘touching’.

Conclusion

LG have managed to pull off a stunning feature set in a slim palm sized handset and Three have add some of its own improvements to sweeten the deal with its range of on-demand content and access to instant messaging and VOIP services from Windows Live and Sype.

This is no iPhone-killer nor does it claim to be, so it’s important to make that distinction when you’re deciding on your next phone. The Viewty has a simple, intuitive UI that screams to be touched and that’s just half the story. LG have included an amazing camera system backed up with a bunch of features that you would normally find on a proper camera. Put simply, I’ve not come across a gadget with an identity crisis like this work so well for it.

To see the LG Viewty in action, check out the video review here

3G, K990, KU990, LG, Mobile Phone, Touchscreen, Viewty