pure roon

The new Viewty KU990 looks like the older Prada (KE850) phone but sports some nifty upgrades

Quote

Touchscreen mobiles are destined to be a hot ticket for the foreseeable future, but with the touch-controlled KU990 Viewty from LG there’s far more than screen-fingering novelty to tap your attention.

The Viewty - daft name, it has to be said - adopts the stylish look and feel of LG’s Prada phone released earlier this year but ups the feature count. HSDPA 3G connectivity is included here, as well as a highly-specified five-megapixel camera, equipped with Schneider-Kreuznach optics, and offering manual focus and high-quality video capture at up to 120 frames per second.

The Viewty, like the Prada doesn’t use a smartphone operating system, like all its competitors. This allows the phone’s interface to be nice and simple, offering a ‘classy minimalism’

LG hope the Viewty will be the first camera phone to be able to compete directly with straight cameras, even having a proper flash, rather than the pretty lame lights that come with the competition. Other camera features include adding effects and processing tools that are often only seen in more expensive cameras.

The handset lends itself to holding the device in landscape mode for snapping. The touchscreen element enables quick access to camera settings and editing tools. There’s plenty of those to play with – as well as autofocus and fully automatic settings, you can adjust contrast, exposure, white balance, ISO, colour tones and flash settings, including red-eye reduction. You can take multiple shots too, plus stitched-together panoramic pictures.

There’s a macro mode, so you can take high-quality close-up shots in focus. Unusually for a mobile phone, LG has also added a manual focus option, controlled either by the jog wheel around the lens or an on-screen touch control.

Reg Hardware have a very long review of the LG Viewty KU990 if you want to read more

Lg have announced the release of the their new KS20 which they hope will be able to compete with Apple’s iPhone, due for release on the 9th November.

This new handset looks suspiciously like the LG PRADA KE850 and is released today in the UK, cunningly a few days before the iPhone.

Quote

Cunningly released just a few days before the iPhone goes on sale in the UK, the KS20 has a 2.8in touchscreen allowing users to view web pages downloaded over 3.6Mb/s HSPDA 3G connections. The tri-band GSM handset also includes 802.11b/g Wi-Fi connectivity, with Bluetooth 2.0 for short-range communication.

The phone ships with a 128MB internal memory and accepts Micro SD cards for storing pictures taken on its two-megapixel camera. However, it also acts as a multimedia device and stores video and music files, including MPEG 4 and MP3 formats, respectively. An FM radio’s included too.

Running on the Windows Mobile 6 OS, the handset gives around four hours of talk time and a good 400 hours in standby, LG claimed.

I have never really liked LG phones, to me they always look like something was missing from their design, and I am afraid that this one does the same for me again. It just isn’t as sexy as the iPhone and if the interface is based on the KE850 then this is just going to be an iPhone rip off rather than a competitor…