After the stuttering morphing touch pad shenanigans of the KF600, LG’s has rightly returned to the complete touch-screen with its older bro, the KF700.
But weirdly, along with the 3-inch touch-sensitive display and traditional sliding mechanical keypad, the LG has grafted on an old school side-mounted jog dial to help out with operational duties.
While it may have some similarities with the KF600, this slider actually takes it design cues from its full touch phone brethren the Viewty and Prada phone. It’s compact size and looks comes straight from the catwalk blower, although with its identical user interface and full-blown HSDPA download speeds could easily be billed as a mini-me version of the Viewty.
However, the curious inclusion of the side jog wheel smacks of LG covering all the operational bases. Press the flanking OK button and an on screen wheel appears with customisable shortcuts of up to five favourite features. Like a third nipple, it seems superfluous because the KF700’s touch-screen actually works very well. Okay, you still have to press quite hard to get a response, but overall it’s rather slick. But despite dissing the jog wheel, we do admit it’s spot-on for scrolling through long menus and music tracks.
It may carry Viewty genes but the KF700’s snapper doesn’t reach heady five-megapixel heights. You’ll have to do with a 3.2-megapixel shutterbug with autofocus and a nice line in ISO settings. And you’ll be thankful of these when shooting in low-lighting conditions because the LED flash is pretty inept. Otherwise, picture quality is merely OK and unfortunately nowhere near Sony Ericsson’s pin-sharp Cyber-shot level.
After the music player sort options debacle on the KF600, LG has thankfully remedied this oversight on the KF700 but in its haste has forgotten to include an equaliser to ramp up the sound. It’s a shame because this would have added another dimension to an otherwise stand-up music player. Naturally a microSD card slot is poised to stash you multimedia swag.
Verdict
The KF700 clearly shows the KF600 was a minor hiccup on LG’s adventures in touch phones. It’s user interface and feature set is of a decent mid-range standard and anyone still wary of taking on a touch-screen toting phone will be comforted by the presence of a sliding keypad and jog dial.
Best features
Minimalist design
HSDPA download speeds
Handsome three-inch 240×380 pixel resolution touch-screen
Not so good
Erratic camera performance
Absence of equaliser on the music player
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