The LG KF700 we had for a few short days was a pre-release beta version and so we decided to do a quick and dirty preview instead a full review. Some features (or disadvantages) may be subject to change in the retail unit, so we decided not to rush a full review.
The LG KF700 has a remarkably responsive user interface, fashionable looks and strives to conquer most of the multimedia applications you might want in a mobile phone. The three input methods are diverse enough for you to find your preference. However, all the three types are rather fused - the only one you could go without is the scroll wheel. The touchscreen display does the job for most tasks, but you need the keypad to enter text. The keypad is useless on its own too, because it has no D-pad. So in the end, you are bound to use at least two of the input methods described.
Design and construction
The LG KF700 is a nicely looking device - it's not the thinnest one around but its slender oblong shape is not something you see everyday. At 110 g the KF700 is definitely not the lightest of handsets too. But the overall feeling you get is of one compact little gadget.
The display follows the same ratio as the body itself (1:2) and has a diagonal of 3 inches. Its resolution is 240 x 480 pixels, which makes it rather uncommon too. Custom made wallpapers and possibly Java games will be your only option if you have your eyes set on this slider.
Speaking of sliding, that's exactly what you have to do to reveal the hidden keypad. The keys are styled in different shades of grey and form the signature LG pattern well known since the original LG Chocolate. The keys are large, oblong and with nice press feedback.
The large touchscreen display and the sliding keypad
The right side of the device houses the proprietary LG connectivity port - this is where you plug your headset, charger and USB cable. Here you also get the camera key and the touchscreen lock key.
Right side: this is where you plug all the peripherals
The left side holds almost no controls except for the special scroll wheel/OK key combo. The scroll wheel can scroll through menus (one line per scroll unfortunately) while the OK key is used for confirming the selection. Pressing the OK key in standby mode will invoke a special customizable shortcut menu.
The metallic scroll wheel offers smooth action, while the OK key is a bit stiff at press. An added disadvantage - at least for us - is the fact that you can't press the scroll wheel itself to make an action. We are used to that solution with its frequent implementations in numerous smartphones and PocketPC by various manufacturers. But it may be just our crabby selves.
Left side: the scroll wheel is clearly visible when the phone is upside-down
The bottom part of the LG KF700 features no controls whatsoever. The top one though has accommodated the microSD memory card slot. It's a good thing that the card is accessible without removing the battery.
The bottom side features no controls, but the top side houses the microSD slot
Held in hand the KF700 might not look the smallest chap around, but you gotta believe us when we say it's really compact - especially when the keypad is closed.
Held in hand the KF700 is really compact - it's almost unnaturally narrow though
The backlighting of both the KF700 keypad and the display is good. However LG displays still suffer under direct sunlight - especially with fingerprint smudges all over its face.
The backlighting of the display and keypad is excellent
Flashy user interface
The user interface of LG KF700 is Flash- based, much like the one in LG Viewty. There are a number of novelties compared to the LG Viewty.
Firstly, there is a new centralized menu for managing profiles, music player and Bluetooth connectivity. It also displays the memory status. To access it, you just need to press the upper part of the screen in standby or in the main menu.
The new menu with status readings
Next, there is new handling of desktop widgets - all of them are hidden onto a sliding pane to the right. You can easily choose which one of them to show on the desktop by sliding out the pane. When you are done you just hide it away.
The new Home screen widgets
Then, there is a new navigation row of icons, which is available across all submenus. The icons are shortcuts to applications such as the task manager, phonebook, messaging and homescreen.
The new navigation bar appears everywhere
And finally, the scroll wheel - the new navigation solution on the side of the handset - brings along its own customizable dial-shaped shortcut menu. However, since the scroll wheel is two-directional only (you can't press it) - you have to start the menu manually pressing the OK key right next to it.
The side scroll wheel is not that impressive
The scroll wheel can be used throughout the whole menu system, however scrolling with it is painfully slow especially in long enough lists. The scrolling flips through one item at a time and you have to scroll like hell to go faster.
Other than that, the same old navigation bar with shortcuts sits on the bottom of the screen. The four available shortcuts are not user configurable. The first shortcut takes you to the Dial pad for you to punch in a number, the second opens the Contacts list, the third one opens the Messaging submenu, and the last one takes you to the main menu.
The traditional Home screen shortcuts and the Dial pad
Beside all that, the user interface of the LG KF700 retains the same menu system as the LG Viewty - simple, yet impressively sophisticated. LG have made a really nice job designing the user interface system.
The main menu consists of four submenus - they are displayed in a column on the right-hand side of the screen. They don't have names but the first one contains elements related to making calls and sending messages. The second one is the entertainment package, which houses the multimedia files, the camera, the FM radio, the games, and the music player. The third submenu includes tools such as the web browser, the Google package, organizer applications such as the Calendar, the Calculator, the Unit converter, etc. And finally, the fourth item handles all the settings.
The four sub-menus: calling and texting • multimedia • various tools • settings
By default, the user interface comes in the black and white theme, well-known ever since the LG Prada phone. Beside that default one, the LG KF700 has another color theme as well.
Applying a more lively interface theme
An absolute must-have for every full touch-based handset, and a feature we miss in the Apple iPhone, is some sort of feedback when the screen is pressed - something besides the touch tone and the touch animation. LG KF700 is haptic-enabled, which means that every press is accompanied by a gentle vibration, that let's you know your press has been accepted. Settings for it include a choice of three types of vibration plus 7 levels of vibration strength.
Touch feedback (haptics) settings
Unlike the LG Viewty however, there is no on-screen QWERTY keyboard, and there is no handwriting recognition either. Now you have a sliding hardware keypad always at hand.
Excellent multimedia performance
The LG KF700 comes with a good 176MB of internal memory (the Viewty had only 100MB) and of course there is a microSD memory card slot. Again, unlike the Viewty, the memory card slot is on the top of the device so hot-swapping cards is definitely an option.
The KF700 file manager appears as the My stuff item in the menu. It includes separate factory-preset folders for different multimedia content. Unlike some of the recent LG phones we reviewed, we had no problem here reading custom folders off the memory card.
The file manager • peeking in the Documents folder
You can copy or move files to the external memory or send them via Bluetooth, and for all of those options you can rely on multiple selection. However, we did notice a huge lag in folder browsing, once the memory card started to fill up.
The main functionality of the image gallery remains the same as the one of the Viewty phone. Browsing images is even faster than the Viewty.
Browsing images is effortless in both portrait and landscape • zooming in
The LG KF700 offers the same MP3 player as the Viewty. You can filter tracks as with any other modern music player - by artist, album, genre, playlist, recently played and few more. The handset itself has a Flight mode, which really makes it an adequate solution as a portable music player. There are still no equalizer settings for you to use to enhance the player sound. The music player skin now changes to match the currently selected interface theme - in the Viewty it always stayed black.
The music player is excellent but still no equalizer presets
Naturally, the music player runs in the background problem-free. The same goes for the FM radio, too. As opposed to the Viewty you can now listen to the radio on the handset loudspeaker - that's a basic feature but it lacked in the LG Viewty. The radio stores up to 24 stations - double the amount available in the LG Viewty. However the radio misses the RDS functionality found in the Viewty - you can only enter a radio station ID manually.
FM radio has double the station memory slots now
The video player of the LG KU990 is much like the one seen in the Prada phone - it is really nice and you can watch videos in fullscreen landscape mode, with or without semi-transparent overlay of player controls. You can also opt for both normal and widescreen aspect ratio. Unfortunately, the DivX playback support lacks here.
Video player
Another downer is the lacking YouTube integration of the Viewty and you can't upload your video files directly from the file manager. That of course may be subject to change as it happened with the LG Viewty.
Camera not up to scratch
The LG KF700 packs a 3 megapixel autofocus camera and doesn't strive to be a dedicated cameraphone, so don't expect wonders. The maximum image resolution is 2048 x 1536 pixels. The camera is equipped with a regular LED flash, nothing impressive really. The camera is supposed to have digital image stabilizer as per the official specifications, however there was no trace of it in our test unit (it's a pre-release beta version).
Due to the unusual display ratio (1:2), the camera uses only the center of the display as a viewfinder. If you set its viewfinder mode to fullscreen, it crops the visible image and you don't get to see the whole composition.
A short press on the dedicated camera key starts the still image camera, while a press-and-hold activates the camcorder. It's not that convenient a solution - as you can frequently start the camera by accident (all it takes is a short press).
The camera interface has run-of-the-mill settings - nothing fancy here. There are now preset scenes or special shooting modes such as panorama. You can shoot in burst and you can use frames to spice up your portrait images.
Some of the still camera settings: flash control • ISO settings • viewfinder ratio
There are white balance presets (a useful feature when shooting indoors when most cameras fail to strike the right balance) and color effects (black and white, negative, sepia, sketch, solarize, emboss)
You can also manually adjust the ISO sensitivity (100-800). The LED flash is easy to control too and you can set it to permanently on to use it as video light. Unfortunately, in our unit the shutter sound couldn't be muted.
Here are some sample photos from the LG KF700 camera:
Here you can also find the same nice gallery that was used in LG Viewty.
The second gallery accessible only via the camera menu
The settings for the camcorder are pretty similar to those of the still image camera. The maximum video resolution is QVGA (320 x 240 pixels) at 15 fps. Videos are recorded in 3GP format only.
The camcorder viewfinder • some of the available settings
Check out the LG KF700 Sample Video and judge for yourselves.
Fluid web browsing
The LG KF700 features high-speed USB Mass Storage support. Much like the Viewty, when you connect the KF700 to a PC you only have the memory card appearing, and the internal memory is not accessible.
As far as network connectivity is concerned, the phone features tri-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support plus HSDPA 7.2Mbps. Bluetooth 1.2 is also a connectivity option with A2DP support for pairing with a stereo headset.
The LG KF700 has a nice web browser - it has the same features as the LG Viewty but with even better implementation. Naturally, you can browse web pages with or without the controls visible. Turning the screen to landscape makes browsing even more enjoyable. There is even a mini-map to help you find your way around elaborate web pages. You can also use the scroll wheel on the back to seamlessly zoom in and out on web pages.
And if all that is not enough, it supports tabbed browsing allowing you to open your links of interest in separate tabs, which can be closed independently later on.
Viewing GSMArena.com fullscreen in both portrait and landscape • the webpage mini-map is handy
Scrolling is fast enough and you can drag pages around with your finger much like you would on an iPhone. It feels natural and it has almost a fluid feeling to it. It definitely manages to surpass what Samsung offers in their full touch handsets.
The preinstalled Google package also enhances the web experience for the KF700 user. Much like the LG Viewty, it offers direct access to Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps, Blogger and the mobile version of YouTube.
The Google package expands the web functionality
Final words…
The LG KF700 is a charming device with a ton of features we've come to like in previous LG full touch handsets such as the Prada and the Viewty. Plus, and it does add some new ones of its own. While it doesn't strive to be a dedicated cameraphone, it's certainly not the "all looks, no brains" type like the LG Prada (which doesn't mean we don't like the Prada - it has its own place under the sun too).
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