Features (Cont.) and Software

Enough about the camera, let's take a closer look at what else is on offer here. The Viewty doesn't have a lot of external buttons and with the camera mode switch we can count to six. That's it, that's all you get. On the front there's a call and end call/power on/off button as well as a back/clear button. On the right hand side there's the camera shutter button, a key/screen lock button which also doubles up as an instant shake reduction button when the camera is in use and finally the camera mode slider.

On the left hand side is a small sliding latch which reveals the headset/charger/USB port when opened. Above this is a lanyard fastener and at the top of the phone is a release button for the back. It's quite tricky to open the back, as it doesn't pop out quite enough to be easy to remove and it's made from very thin steel which makes it light and quite fiddly to remove. Once you've managed to open the back, you're greeted by a fairly standard 3.7V 1,000mAh Li-Ion battery and underneath it is the SIM-card holder. Just above the battery is a micro SD card slot, although you have to remove the battery to actually be able to access it, which is a pain if you want to swap your memory card.

Internally we're looking at a fairly well specified handset with some 90MB of user accessible memory and what appears to be a fairly snappy processor, although we're not sure what it is or at what speed it's running since LG doesn't provide these kind of details. It works on GSM 900, 1800 and 1900MHz networks and it supports EDGE and GPRS. It also works on 2100MHz UMTS 3G networks and it supports HSDPA speeds of up to 3.6Mbps.

It also supports Bluetooth 2.0, but we weren't able to find out if this was with EDR support or not. The Viewty also has a built in FM radio, but as we didn't get the headset with the review unit, we were unable to test this. It doesn't have WiFi which is a shame, but you rarely get it all, so we're not going to make a big a deal out of it no matter how nice an inclusion it would've been.

The Viewty has a lot of software features and it has built in DivX support, something of a novelty on mobile phones. The only problem we had was that it wasn't happy playing any of the files we tested, possibly due to the resolution, but the only warning message we got was that the file wasn't supported even though several of the files we tested with would show a preview icon. It will also play back 3GP and MPEG4 files and we had some better success with some AVI files recorded with a Windows Mobile device as these played just fine.

The built in music player handles AAC, eAAC, MP3 and WMA, but again we ran into problems with the Viewty not recognising over half of the tracks on the memory card we had stored them on. We're not sure why this is, as all the files have played fine on other handsets we've tried them with. LG has also integrated a wide range of Google features into the handset, but again it seemed like we weren't allowed to access Gmail due to some kind of a network tie-in, although Google maps worked quite well over a 3G connection. There's also support for Blogger and YouTube and depending on where you get this phone you might also get MSN or Yahoo messenger on it.