Phone Review: LG Viewty Smart

I am not a tech guy. I am not particularly tech-savvy and I don't consider myself a geek. But I do know an intuitive device when I come across one, and the LG Viewty Smart is only mediocre when it comes to the overall quality of a $400 phone.

In the interest of not appearing like an ignorant dumbass, I will not go through the tech specs, or all the features of the phone. Instead, I will focus on what I have personally experienced with the device during its four months of usage so far.

Let us start with a good quality: the camera is great. 8 megapixels with a fairly strong zoom meant the pictures come out quite nice even when spread to full screen on a computer. The various 'shot modes' are cool, but for most recreational point-and-shoot cell phone camera users, the Intelligent Shot mode (IS), 'Auto', and Night Mode, are good enough. The video recording quality is excellent, too.

The camera is great. It is what this line of LG phones are geared for - taking good pictures - and to this end, LG does a good job.

But that's about as far as it goes.

The Viewty Smart is a full touchscreen phone, with one homescreen button, an on/off switch on top and volume buttons on the sides. What a full touchscreen phone entails is that the touchscreen needs to be intuitive, fast, and precise. The LG touchscreen is not any of these things. When compared to real smart phones like the HTC Hero or iphone 3GS, the LG touchscreen feels slow, lagging, and amateur.

A personal problem I've had is sometimes I would receive calls, but the screen would not light up to let me press 'receive'! That means I'm left staring at the screen, while the phone rings, and I can't pick up. I suspect it might have something to do with the room being very warm and the screen not responding because of that, but that probably sounds ridiculous.

The horizontal text messaging QWERTY keyboard, while seems like a smaller version of the iphone QWERTY keyboard, is quite difficult to type with; owners will need to develop very agile and delicate typing fingers to be able to text fast.

This is the issue: in this day in age, we don't just want to be able to text, or text accurately, we want to text fast. And the LG Interface doesn't deliver.

The Viewty Smart cannot go 3G (not mine, anyway), which means it is not a smart phone. The web-surfing abilities of this phone is weak, as well. The browser lacks like crazy, and the not-so-big screen just discourages any user to go onto the internet for any extended period.

Finally, it had not occurred to me that purchasing an expensive phone like this one would mean problems like it being incompatible with an Apple computer. This is beyond disappointing. Luckily I have installed Windows Vista via Boot Camp, otherwise I would've had to use another computer to sync my phone with and upload pictures and music and stuff. But this meant that every time I want to do this, I have to flip over to windows, a very annoying and tedious thing to do.

That's about it, the LG Viewty Smart, a phone that is light in weight, looks slick, great for taking pictures and (just about) nothing more. While I do not regret picking this phone over the iPhone, LG would probably not be on my top 3 in choice for my next purchase.