LG KT520 review

LG has put its head firmly above the parapet with some resoundingly high end mobiles like its eight-magapixel toting Renoir and its tasty KC550, an entry level handset designed to bring five-megapixels to the masses. Then there is the quirky KS360 with its sliding Qwerty keyboard for text-freaks.

Now, sitting towards the middle of the pile we have the KT520. This is a prepay handset and O2 is offering it for 89.99 on its Pay and Go tariff. Clearly not intended to break new ground, can the KT520 manage to hold its own in the middle of the road?

This is a slider phone and it has to be said we think it is a bit on the chunky side. It is 15.3mm thick, 49.6mm wide and 101.4mm with the slide closed. That thickness may stop you popping it into a slinky pocket though. On the plus side, if you can cram it in, the 97g of weight is not going to bother you.

The front controls have a couple of useful features on offer. The D-pad has the usual central select button and surrounding directional frame. In this case the frame is punctuated with arrows to remind you that up, down, left and movement are possible. As if you really need that!

It is the select button that has the novel feature. It can be made touch sensitive. Turn this facility on and you can pass the pad of a finger across it to move around as you can on the Samsung i8510 and Nokia N81. We found it worked particularly well for scrolling lists and Web browsing.

We also like the front mounted switcher button on the left of the D-pad. Press this and you can move between applications that are opened. Another shortcut is on the left softkey when you are in the Home screen. The label ‘My stuff’ is on screen and choosing it will take you to a list of folders containing things like images, sounds, videos, games and apps, and downloads.

LG’s system of hardwiring menu options to numberpad keys is also a boon if the slide is open and you want ultra-fast movement through menus.

This is all good news, but the screen disappoints slightly. It measures 2.2 inches across diagonal corners, but looks a little smaller than it really is because it is somewhat lost in the large fascia.

We’re also a little bit suspicious about the quality of the numberpad. The keys are large enough and we had no trouble at all using them for texting. However, they are arranged on four horizontal strips of plastic which have rather more flex than we’d like. Long term robustness may be an issue especially if you are a bit heavy handed.

This is a 3G handset complete with front facing camera for those video calls you may want to make at some stage. You won’t find anything cutting edge about this phone in terms of its software internals, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is to be avoided at all costs.

There is 30MB of memory built in and a microSD card slot on the right edge. The music player is reasonable, and loudspeaker volume is a little on the quiet side, which should make fellow travellers at school chucking out time happy. The equaliser seems to have an effect though we were disappointed to find that there are no slots for user defined settings. Worse, you have to use LG’s proprietary headset connector and the provided in-ear phones are one-piece. Yeuch!

Apart from the music player there is a lot more here of use. Calendar and to do list manager, LG’s Secret Memo app that lets you password protect notes, calculator, stopwatch, unit converter, alarms, Web browser and RSS reader. Like we said, nothing groundbreaking, but a good, solid range nonetheless.

There is a side button for launching the camera and shooting. The camera shoots images at three-megapixels and has autofocus but there is no flash, no self portrait mirror, and a fairly standard range of shot features. Burst mode, night mode, negative and sepia shooting, various white balance presets, but nothing really worthy of shouting about.

Both image and video quality are average rather than outstanding.

LG says you should get about three hours of talk time, 200 hours on standby. We’ve seen better from a mobile but on those occasions when we didn’t thrash the music player constantly we did manage to get through a couple of days between charges. We had no trouble with call quality, either.

We can’t say the general design of this handset is visually very appealing to us, and we did find it a bit chunky to pocket. The camera probably won’t suit anyone very keen on photography, either.

Then again, this is a reasonably priced phone for pay as you go users.