Last year's success of the Viewty handset made touchscreen phones a popular market trend. The handset sold millions of copies, its various modifications included in the total count. The would-be-killers like Samsung F490 were never actually able to beat it, Viewty's virtues backed up by a democratic price and a smart advertising campaign, let alone the excellent camera.

This year the company issues an upgraded version of the handset, revamped and re-christened to become KC910 Renoir. The gadget preserves the same positioning, ergonomics and overall concept, coming with a beefed up camera, more functional modes and a genuine touchscreen support. The screen now has a better picture quality. Several wireless connectivity options are now on the gadget's feature list. There exist a few close rivals, but the whole situation is very similar to the last year's: Renoir is more versatile, has a better camera with more options, and enters the market at an earlier date. So we get a worthy successor to Viewty, able to serve as the best possible replacement.

LG KC910 Renoir specs:

• Supported networks: GSM / GPRS / EDGE 850/900/1800/1900, UMTS / HSDPA 900/2100
• Screen: TFT 3”, 240x400, 262K colors
• Camera: 8 Mp, auto / manual focus, Schneider-Kreuznach optics, QVGA video 5-120 fps, VGA 30 fps, xenon flash
• Memory: 70 Mb of onboard memory, microSD cards up to 8 Gb supported
• Connectivity: Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, TV-Out, GPS receiver
• Battery: Li-Ion 1000 mAh
• Up to 220 minutes of talktime
• Up to 320 (GSM) / 350 (UMTS) hours of standby
• Size: 07,8x55,9x13,95 mm
• Weight: 114 g
• Price: 570 euros

KC910 is a candy bar handset stripped of any type of keyboard, offering a large touchscreen instead. Its design is something less original in comparison with that of KE990. Some of Viewty's original design ideas are gone, making it look more like a conventional handset than an improvised digital camera. The metal back panel was substituted with a plastic replacement (yet sporting an exquisite texture looking like the mirror surface of a compact disc). The two available color versions are black and white, the latter looking a bit better and less exposed to grease markings. The casing is adorned with a chrome-colored framing. The few mechanical buttons are semi-transparent, slightly sunk below the casing surface. The button markings are placed under the buttons themselves and not on the button surface, which looks in a way original. The button backlight is strong and even.

The face panel has three buttons, the central acting as the application menu / task manager launch button. On KE990, this button worked as a Delete key and Samsung M8800 has it configured as the Back navigation key. It's hard to tell which approach is better for ergonomics. Each of these has its own advantages and disadvantages. The screen is protected with a mineral glass. The screen colors fade in strong sunlight, but all the info remains perfectly legible. The screen sensitivity is pleasingly high.

The side surfaces have a matte, rough texture. The left side is where you will find the memory card and data cable slots protected with flaps. There's no dedicated jack for the headset, the same data cable slot used to plug audio accessories. An audio control unit identical to the one shipped with LG KM500 is included into the sales package. On the right surface, you will find a volume rocker, a shoot button and a touchscreen blocker (alternatively serving to turn on the image stabilization feature in the camera mode.

The top and bottom ends are free of any control elements. Similar to LG Viewty, a moving ring is installed around the camera lens, used to set the lens guard on and off. The mechanism is quite handy. If the camera is put on the standby mode, you can bring the application back simply by holding the shoot button. The lens protrudes over the surface by a 2 mm margin. A xenon flash and auto-focusing backlight are neighboring the camera. The back panel is easily removed. Below it you will find a 1000 mAh Batter and a SIM card slot. There's no way to hot-swap the card, though the phone can function in the Flight Mode without imposing any limitations on its functionality.

On the whole, Renoir turned out a successful solution both in the senses of design and ergonomics. It doesn't look as original as Viewty, but the overall usability remains on the same level and the functionality was actually increased.

The screen of KC910 has a 3'' diagonal (40x66 mm) and a 262K color palette. The screen resolution is 240x400. A small improvement over Viewty, you just get a slightly improved picture at the same resolution. A luminance sensor is now in, automatically tweaking the brightness levels to adequately fit the current ambient lighting. A custom fixed brightness level can be forced in the options, effectively deactivating the luminance sensor.

As you see, both have the same resolution, but Samsung has a slightly bigger screen while LG offers a better picture quality. The screen touch sensitivity is the same in either case, and so is the performance. The screen settings include the vibration feedback level, sounds, vibration type. The user is free to turn all of this stuff off if he likes so.

The design is in a way ascetical, only two color variants being available – black and white. Judging by the experience of Viewty, we can expect more color versions to appear after some time has passed. Any custom wallpaper may be set to replace the default one coming with the theme. The font size and type are also customizable.

The wireless connectivity comes in the shape of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi 802.11 (b/g). The closest rival doesn't offer any Wi-Fi support, LG totally victorious on this front. Nowadays Wi-Fi is a must for any high-ranking mobile device. Given a full A2DP support, it's no wonder the handset works perfectly with Bluetooth headsets. Actual data transfer rates revolve around 6,4 Mbps. Bluetooth options include settings like invisibility mode, device detection timeout and a list of profiles.

LG KC910 employs a 1000 mAh battery that can keep the handset online for about two days of normal duty (approximately one hour of talking, two or three hours of viewing multimedia content and playing music). If you use the phone exclusively as a player, a full battery charge is wasted by a 14-hour continuous mp3 playback cycle, a small improvement over Viewty's endurance test score.

The user interface was heavily improved, many of Viewty's issues now gone for good. The basic menu organization principle stays the same, though. Animations now use newer, better looking graphics. The widgets come in plenty and are given a brand new control interface. The widget panel is located at the bottom of the screen. It can be viewed either as a miniature size four-button quick application launch bar or as a full-blown widget tab. Widgets can be listed or moved to the desktop. Unfortunately, you can't add or remove anything – no customization options are available for this list. The four application buttons on the quick bar are Main Menu, Dial, Messages and Phonebook. The upper part of the screen is where all the stat indicators are habitually displayed: multitasking mode, battery charge level, current profile, alarm clock, background mode, player, Bluetooth mode, network signal level. Tapping on one of the icons will expand the info. If the mp3 player is running in the background, a small bar appears below the status bar, showing the stats of the currently playing track. The full-blow Java multitasking allows you to run a variety of applications at the same time.

The main menu looks in a big way similar to that of LG Viewty or KF700, featuring the same four columns with features distributed between the different groups. KF700 even had a special wheel on one of its sides, letting you skip between those almost instantly. The four available categories are Communications, Entertainment, Utilities and Settings. First comes the department responsible for all the connectivity, messaging and phone talks. In this menu you will find functions like dial manager, phonebook, call logs and message manager. The second department embraces user content folder, camera, flick studio, music, video, voice recorder, FM radio and games menu items. The third department gives access to PIM, browser and carrier menu. The last department lets you configure Bluetooth and a multitude of other things. This sort of function grouping helps to save a lot of time, serving as a better alternative to the traditional single-category listing like in the rest of the phones. The icons can be customized to follow a user-set order, something unavailable with Viewty.

Thanks to the high performance, the menus work totally without any lags. Menus containing lists, like the phonebook, can be easily scrolled with the help of a stylus or right with your finger with equal ease. Depending on how abruptly you do the scrolling motion, the scrolling speed changes accordingly. E.g. if you do a short finger slash along the screen, the menu will jump 10-20 lines in the corresponding direction. The accelerometer automatically switches the screen orientation to match the current position of the handset in space. The affected applications include browser, gallery and screen input windows, but aren't limited to these three.

LG KC910 stands out as one of the best options for easy and fast text input. Just like with Nokia 5800, there are four alternate text input options available:

• Regular keyboard – a twelve-button panel that requires a varying number of button taps to produce the wanted symbol.

• Full-size keyboard – a QWERTY-type keyboard activated on turning the phone in a horizontal position.

• Hand-written input – the bottom of the screen is split into two squares, each one enough to host one handwritten symbol, works well with the stylus

• Full-screen hand-written input – the whole screen is used as a text input field, this being the fastest text input mode available on this phone (let alone T9). The user can input whole words without any delay; if you don't write anything for longer than a second, the already written symbols are digitally processed, recognized and turned into regular text. The OCR processing speed is rather high, recognition errors being rather rare. This input mode sports a lot of settings: the input field transparency, the brush width, color, the OCR delay length and numerous other things.

We really liked the music player. It combines nice graphics and good ergonomics. You can switch between album cover and visualizer to be shown during playback. The top section of the screen displays various status info and four buttons – Random Playback, Looped Playback Mute and Dolby Enhancement, the latter meant to activate a sophisticated brandware that will improve sounding in a number of ways. The bottom part of the screen has the three big playback control buttons. Manageable playlists come as a standard function. The player isn't as highly functional as some of the more professional analogs, but is quite enough to provide more comfort than annoyance. LG KC910 has a really good sound quality, ranking above Samsung M8800, drawing benefit from the integrated Dolby Mobile sound processing feature pack.

The lack of a standard 3.5 mm audio jack, limiting you to the use of the bundled adapter. The sales box also contains a dedicated sound control set, making KC910 a fair music solution.

KC910 is equipped with a full-blown GPS unit that works with Google Maps and lets the user add geo tags to a photo's meta data. The receiver is very sensitive. Unfortunately, you don't get any other options for map software. Maps are redownloaded every time you address the service, the phone provides no way to save them in the memory.

The PIM looks like this: you get a caulculator, a measures converter, and a voice recorder with a limitless record length. Several independent alarms can be set, each having customizable set-off time, activation days and signal type. The calendar has three different view modes: monthly, weekly and daily. Expired events can be automatically purged. A new event is assigned a type selectable from Metting, Anniversary and Birthday. Then a subject, start and end times and alarm are configured.

As we have already mentioned, the camera is a key selling point for this product. No other touchscreen handsets with 8 Mp cameras are expected to hit the shelf in the foreseeable future, save for Samsung M8800. The analogy with compact handheld cameras is obvious, this kind of gadgets sporting a long history of touchscreen usage among models from the top price bracket. With it, you don't get any really huge advantage on a mobile phone, it just becomes a little quicker to handle. The camera lens slightly sticks above the surface. It is protected by a mechanical lens guard. A xenon flash resides nearby. It takes about 2 seconds to launch the camera and another 4 seconds to focus on an object, take picture and save it in the memory. The viewfinder is a bit inert, but not really annoying.

The camera interface has a lot in common with LG Viewty, it's just equally handy. The main settings available from the settings available from a list in the right half of the screen are:

• go to gallery,
• flash mode (auto, red eye filter, off),
• select shooting mode
• exposure settings

At the bottom of the screen you will find a zoom scrollbar, which looks a bit out of place because you have the volume controls that serve well to do all the zooming without any help from duplicate keys. On the left you will see the camera mode switch icon and the misc settings menu shortcut. The only flaw that KC910 has on this front is the long way you have to wade through the menus to activate the macro mode. There's no quick shortcut for doing that.

The following scene presets are available:

• Auto
• Portrait
• Landscape
• Night
• Beach
• Sport

The standard resolutions available for the photos are:

• 3264х2448 (8М)
• 2592х1944 (5М)
• 2048х1536 (3,2М)
• 1600х1200 (2М)
• 1280х960 (1,3М)
• 640х480 (0,3М)
• 320х240

The available post-processing effects, white balance and picture quality settings have nothing special about them. . In the miscellaneous options, you can set the storage folder, geo tagging, image stabilizer, shutter sound and viewfinder grid. The ISO level is adjustable between 100 to 1600 with an Auto option available. The two features that might deserve some special attention are Blink Detection (once you've blinked, the camera takes a picture) and Back Light Compensation, serving as an alternative to the namesake scene setting available on Samsung M8800, helping to take a better picture of an object standing in the way of a strong source of light.

Let's have a look at some sample photos and compare the quality to Samsung M8800 PIXON:

Daytime shooting:

LG KC910 / Samsung M8800

As you see, LG KC910 does better in taking daytime landscape shots, the colors form a more vivid-looking palette, Samsung often producing darker and bleaker pictures. On the other hand, the Renoir at times gives the picture a pinkish tint not observable with Samsung.

Macro Shooting:

LG KC910 / Samsung M8800

There's no clear leader in this test. M8800 has better luck with certain shots and KC910 with others. It's noteworthy that LG maintains a generally higher rate of successful shots, proving its focusing to be a bit better. The sharpness and color rendering are on a level with both models.

Indoor shooting:

LG KC910 / Samsung M8800

M8800 is less dependent on lighting, so it takes indoor shooting sessions with great ease. Things go in a way more difficult for KC910. Pictures taken with it indoors aren't so sharp and sometimes suffer color corruption and some sort of fogginess.

Nighttime shooting:

LG KC910 / Samsung M8800

Due to the above-mentioned reasons, Samsung is just as preferable for nighttime shooting. Pictures have less noise in them, the accuracy stays high. But this doesn't work for remote objects and landscape backgrounds in general. The xenon flash mounted on KG KC910 does much better when it comes to this sort of task.

The camera settings available in the video mode are mostly the same with those in the photo mode. The maximum resolution is 640x480. The framerate is 30 fps, but can be set to a 120 Slow-Mo rate (provided that you use a 320x240 reslution) or to Fast Motion (5 fps). Video soundtracks keep a high quality, the Noise Free Microphone option helping to reduce the background noise.

KG KC910 sample video

The gallery sports a nice interface taking full advantage of the accelerometer to switch the screen orientation automatically. You view photos one by one or as a list or thumbnail grid. Content can be sorted by size, date or filename. The editing mode is a standard feature, allowing to apply a number of special effects and frames, adjust the color balance, etc.

Smape's Opinion

LG KC910 is a sequel worthy of its Viewty precursor, offering a large touchscreen, an unmatched functionality and a quality camera for a matchingly high price. With the new handset you get even more powers and opportunities, but it lacks the spirit and shape of the original, sporting a more generic look bordering on utilitarian. Still, a small fraction of Viewty's charm persists in its progeny: some nice touches like the transparent buttons below the screen, the CD-surface back panel, the quality screen are still there. The Renoir handset, by a small margin, prevails over the shortly expected Samsung M8800 PIXON due to a better functionality, feature balance and camera, maintaining a comparable starting price. The camera passes the tests with dignity. The quality of the photos is excellent, almost ideal provided that the pictures are taken in daylight. The availability of manual focusing and a smart viewfinder interface further help to polish usability.

The widgets are a really neat addition to the main interface. The diverse text input methods ensure comfortable typing for people with different habits. Of course, there are a number of weak spots. With Renoir, you won't get a dedicated GPS application, having to use Google Maps instead without a possibility to store the maps locally. There are no standardized slots available either; the speaker isn't the best thing around. The audio output is quite god though and Wi-Fi doesn't consume battery charge as fast as some other phones. As a successor to Viewty, Renoir bears the title with pride. Unless you don't need a touchscreen, there are no alternatives to this handset that we are aware of.

The handset has already begun retailing at 570 euros, a minor price reduction is awaited within two months or so. In any case, Renoir doesn't look overpriced, its functionality beating that of its only rival manufactured by Samsung with no other likely rivals around. So we'd expect relatively good sales, not below Viewty's level. At some point in future, extra color variants are sure to appear.

Author: Anton Spiridonov, spiridonov@corp.mail.ru

SMAPE.com

	Comments: