LG KF700 review

LG has been making much use of touchscreen technology lately, introducing several handsets that offer novel variations on tap-to-control, all-touch user interfaces. Following its Prada phone and KU990 Viewty touchscreen 5-megapixel camera mobile, LG adopted an unusual twin-screen InteractPad partial touch interface for its KF600 sliderphone. And LG's soon to be released Secret adds yet another twist on touch control.

With the KF700, though, LG has kept the large touchscreen at the heart of the device's operations. Nonetheless there are no less that three input methods used on this device - the touchscreen, a normal slider keypad, and a Shortcut Dial. No doubt LG is hoping that this approach will cover most user preferences.

The LG KF700 is a 3G handset with mobile broadband HSDPA high-speed data connectivity (capable of downloading at up to 7.2Mbps if supported by the network), and has a healthy spread of multimedia functionality built in. A 3-megapixel camera with flash is on the back panel, while there's a front-facing camera for face-to-face 3G video-calling. There's a multi-format music player and video player, a full web browser with full screen landscape view, and an FM radio function.

Despite its touchscreen, though, the KF700 isn't powered by a smartphone operating system, nor is it Wi-Fi enabled.

Screen test
With a 3-inch touch display (a 262K-colour, 240x280 pixels TFT), you get plenty of screen real estate to view content and browse the web in full screen landscape or portrait mode. In addition, the touch interface offers a hands-on way to look at and sort through content. You can flick through picture galleries, scroll through tune lists and whizz through contacts with a swipe of your finger. You can also move around webpages with a bit of digit action. There's vibrating haptic feedback to let you know when screen buttons have been pressed properly.

Each type of input method is designed to carry out functions that suits its particular strengths. The Shortcut Dial, about the diameter of a 5p piece, sits on the back of the phone, with the edge protruding from the side. It's activated by a pressing a small side button, and pulls up a semi-circle carousel of six shortcut icons on the side of the display. These correspond to certain features or functions (either pre-set or user-defined), and rotate as you spin the dial. You can tap the screen to select or press the shortcut key on the side.

The shortcuts are pre-set for the usual phone stuff like web homepage, photo album, music player, video capture, radio but can be replaced with a bunch of other features and functions, so you can customise the shortcuts for your usage.

As well as offering quick access to shortcuts, the dial can also be used in conjunction with the touchscreen menus to scroll up or down through options, rather than swiping your finger to move through them. Anyone used to using side dial controls on other devices may find it unusual that you can't click it in to select functions - you have to tap the screen, or alternatively use the regular numberpad keys to select the appropriate numbered menu option.

Handling and design
The slide out numberpad and touchscreen combination doesn't particularly bulk out the KF700. Overall, it's smaller and lighter than the Viewty, measuring 102(h) x 51(w) x 14.5 (d)mm and weighing 107g. It has a minimalist casing, in black or silver finish, with the touchscreen dominating the otherwise keyless front.

Slip the screen up, and the numberpad comes into play. Keys are flush to the surface, but large and cleverly designed with alternate matt and gloss finishes to help fingers differentiate between the keys. The chrome dial control is a feature on the back panel, although the camera and flash are the only practical interest. This can be fired up by a button on the side, bringing the camera into action in landscape mode. The shortcut dial - at the bottom left as you're holding it in camera mode - then unusually becomes the zoom control.

Looking at the touchscreen operation in a bit more detail, LG has followed a similar basic set-up to that employed on the Viewty. There are four icon labeled buttons at the bottom of the display for quick access to the main menu, messaging menu, contacts list and phone dialing function.

In addition, LG has added a widgets style tab towards the top of the display, where you can select one of four items to be displayed on the standby screen (clock, calendar, memo notes or comparative world times). In addition, you can tap the regular status icons (signal and battery strength etc.) to get a full page of detailed status info.

At launch, in the UK O2 has an exclusive distribution deal for the LG KF700, and on its version there's an additional O2 icon to take you to the O2 Active portal homepage (plus O2-themed wallpaper, naturally).

Tapping the main menu icon on the bottom of the screen pulls up another vertical column of four icon-marked tabs, representing certain sections of the menu system (phone functions, multimedia, office/web, and settings). When you tap each of these, or scroll through them with the dial, a separate grid of labeled symbols appear for each of the main functions or options. Tapping these either takes you into the function - like the camera or music player - or into further sub-menu lists you can scroll through.

The touchscreen menus are intuitive to find your way around; after a few taps to get your bearings, you get familiar with the structure pretty quickly. And as you go through the functions, you get the icons on the top of the display to give you quick access to the home page, contacts and messaging menus from wherever you are. You can also use multiple functions and switch between them.

While you can use finger swipes to move through content, the touch control isn't as smooth, easy to operate and intuitive as the Apple iPhone's benchmark-setting user interface. The screen isn't as immediately responsive as Apple's multi-touch control, and some of the scrolling through lists with finger flicks requires practice and precision.

Having a slide out numberpad means text inputting feels familiar and isn't dependent on fiddly screen tapping. This mostly works effectively, though it's sometimes tricky to edit messages quickly - you have to tap precisely to move the cursor as there are no forward or back keys to locate it.

Browsing
The keypad helps with the browser too, which is nicely implemented here. HSDPA ups the download speed, and you can view full web pages in either portrait or widescreen landscape mode. The Shortcut Dial enables you to swiftly zoom in and out of pages, and you can use a screen map to see your position on a page, helping you work your way around complicated webpages. Sidebar icon buttons help with browser negotiation too. It generally works well (though again, not as smoothly as the Apple Safari browser).

On the generic KF700 spec list, a suite of Google applications, including Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps and Blogger, are supported; however, the O2 version of the KF700 doesn't include these options, which is a real shame. It does though have the Yahoo! oneSearch mobile-optimised search engine app included.

Camera snapping
Naturally, the camera operates in landscape mode too. There's a dedicated camera button on the side, which works as a 2-step capture button in conjunction with the KF700's autofocus system. The 3-megapixel camera provides facilities to shoot good quality images, with plenty of detail, and get precise subject focusing - but you also can take quick snaps without having to wait for the autofocus system to lock on, by pressing the capture button quickly rather than holding. This should please casual snap'n'senders as well as those looking for higher quality pics.

The touchscreen camera interface is well laid out, intuitive and with plenty enough settings adjustment options without overwhelming the usability. In bright light, reflections mean it can be difficult to see the options you want to tap as clearly as you'd like.
Still, it's easy to switch the flash on or off as needed and adjust the contrast levels, while an additional menu for settings spreads options out as a simple grid of buttons onscreen.

You can read in more details about the KF700's camera capabilities and view sample images taken with the camera in our related article LG KF700 Camera Samples.

Results are generally impressive, with good colour rendition and detail. The LED flash is reasonably bright too, although you should control its usage for optimum results at mid to close range.

The video record function lets you capture images at maximum QVGA (320x240 pixels) resolution at 15 frames per second. This is way off the shooting quality and flexibility available on the Viewty and the forthcoming LG Secret. Footage is not impressive. Obviously, playing back pre-recorded video clips on the widescreen is another matter entirely, with the KF700's screen a fine platform for viewing downloaded or sideloaded video.

The various wallpaper and themes supplied look good on the large display too; LG has again loaded up flash animations based on Keith Haring artwork, which are striking across the full screen.

Tuning in
On top of the imaging, there's a very listenable music player, and an FM radio. The music player interface is straightforward, visually attractive, and not over-elaborated with too much touch-control trickery. There are familiar category headings under which tunes are arranged, and you can flick through lists of tunes to get the ones you're after.

It's not as sophisticated as the iPhone - more like a regular phone player with touch instead of D-pad control - but it does the job efficiently. There's 90MB of internal user memory, plus MicroSD expansion (up to 2GB) via a card slot on the top of the phone.

The supplied earphones are OK and produce a perfectly acceptable performance. They plug in on the side of the phone, to the charger socket - which makes pocketing the phone when playing tunes more awkward than if the connector was on the bottom. Usefully, thee earphones are a 2-piece set that incorporate a 3.5mm jack socket that allows you to upgrade to a standard set of headphones if you want to upgrade sound quality. Of course, stereo Bluetooth is supported too if you want to go down the wirefree headset route.

A regular selection of organiser functionality and tools are incorporated - voice recorder, email, calendar, alarms and so on - that are adapted quite well to the touch interface environment. It can easily be synced up with a PC too, with LG PC suite software and a USB cable supplied.

Performance
With a touchscreen and 3G connectivity, efficient power management is important. LG quotes its standby time at up to 340 hours on GSM networks or 280 hours on 3G, and talktime of up to 3 hours. In practice, with an average amount of playing with features and making calls, we got a comfortable two days between charges. Expect less though if you're playing lots of video or listening to the MP3 player, or using other power hungry features.

It's inevitable that any touchscreen mobile is judged against the iPhone, and none has yet come close to emulating its ease of use. The LG KF700's non-smartphone touchscreen operation is not as sophisticated and easy-going as Apple's, and its responsiveness not as elegantly smooth. But its nonetheless fairly easy to get to grips with and for the most part the touch controls work sensibly with the phone's functions and applications.

The belts-and-braces approach of having a slider numberpad as well as a touchscreen may not be to everyone's taste. It does make character entry comfortable for texters, and some people may prefer the option of a 'proper' keypad for dialling. The Shortcut Dial, while useful for scrolling, could be better utilised if it could click to select as well - and positioning it on the other side of the phone might be better for right hand thumb control.

The lack of Wi-Fi could be a disappointment for some potential buyers; using that lovely big screen and browser for low-cost high-speed surfing away from your mobile network could've been very useful. There is a decent roster of features you'd expect on a mid-tier phone - the camera puts in a respectable performance, as does the onboard music player, and its HSDPA browsing speeds are welcome. But apart from the touch interface, LG hasn't gone overboard to make this decent enough handset a must-have mobile.

Compare al LG KF700 online deals.

LG KF700 technical specifications