View, what a scorcher! The LG Viewty is undeniably a looker, measuring a slender 104×54x15mm, and boasting a three-inch touchscreen. But if there’s anything that Naomi Campbell taught us, it’s that not everything that looks beautiful is necessarily good. So can the LG Viewty dispel the Miss Campbell tag? On the whole, yes.
As the name suggests the LG Viewty is being sold predominantly as an ‘imaging’ phone. So what are the images like? Well, thanks to a five-megapixel sensor, the images it takes are more crisp than a deep-fried potato and clearer than fresh tap water. Unfortunately, wrestling with the jog wheel around the lens can put greasy smears on your pictures. A lens cover would have been nice! On the plus side, you do get autofocus, with an image stabiliser that’ll just about work to counter-act your shaky hands. Movie capture is pleasantly sharp, too, even in the super slo-mo 120fps setting.
Elsewhere, the Viewty is 3G-enabled for super-fast downloads, and the haptic touchscreen (it vibrates so you know when you’ve pressed a button) works well for text messaging and emailing. Overall, the navigation is about as effortless as sitting down, while call quality is fine.
There are some flaws: the flash needs a bit more oomph, for instance. And for LG to call this a “professional level camera phone” is a bit misleading. It’s a definite step up from most cam-phones, but not a giant leap. The 100MB internal memory’s not great either, but you can expand that up to 2GB via the microSD card slot. Plus the battery’s not brilliant at four hours talk time.
That said none of these minus points are going to put you off buying an LG Viewty if what you’re after is a good camera phone that oozes style… and isn’t an iPhone or Nokia N-Series.
