LG GC900 Viewty

Posted on 11. May, 2009 by IBM in Previews.

Tags: LG, LG GC900 Viewty, S-class UI, Touch UI

LG GC900 Viewty Smart (sometimes also called Viewty 2) is making a run for it as the next LG flagship. What can we say, when you’re blue-blooded, some things come au naturel – the snappy and quite thumbable S-Class UI, the 8 megapixel camera, Wi-Fi and GPS all hide behind a 3-inch touchscreen lodged into a body that’s only 12.4mm thick. We don’t know about you, but by our books all that gadgetness calls for a proper inspection.

As rumors have it, the LG Viewty Smart is set to start its European tour as early as May or June, despite the fact that it has only been officially announced two weeks ago. Well, it’s true, LG did tease us with a prototype back at the MWC 2009 in February, but it’s only now that we get to hold it in our hands and see it in good working order. And pleased we are…

LG GC900 Viewty Smart at a glance

* General: GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz, UMTS 900/2100, HSDPA 7.2 Mbps, EDGE class 12
* Dimensions: 108.9 x 56.1 x 12.4 mm, 102 g
* Display: 3″ 16M-color capacitive touchscreen TFT of WVGA resolution (480 x 800 pixels)
* Memory: 1.5GB flash storage, microSD card slot (up to 16GB)
* User interface: S-Class Touch UI
* Still camera: 8 megapixel autofocus camera, Schneider-Kreuznach optics, LED flash, manual focus, geo-tagging, image stabilization, multi face detection (up to 3), smile detection
* Video recording: 720×480@30fps, VGA@30fps, QVGA time-lapse and slow-mo video recording
* Connectivity: Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP, Wi-Fi, TV-out, USB port, GPS receiver with A-GPS
* Misc: Accelerometer for screen auto rotate, Multi-touch input, DivX/XviD support, Dolby for Mobile audio enhancement, FM radio, office document viewer
* Battery: Li-Ion 1000 mAh
* Retail price: N/A

The LG GC900 Viewty Smart unit we received is still a pre-production one, but well functioning one – we’ve seen enough to tell. But still, we don’t deem it ready for a full review, so instead we’ve prepared the following quick preview to give you some live scoop of what the Viewty 2 is all about.

Unfortunately, the Viewty Smart name is a bit misleading. The Viewty 2 is a smart handset indeed but only design-wise. From the inside, it’s not a smartphone or anything, no matter how much we would have liked that. Instead it’s a regular full touch feature phone, but one with a really polished UI and top-notch imaging capabilities.

Final words

The Viewty Smart has a gorgeous display and a best-of-class user interface. But we’ve already seen that stuff on the LG Arena so our brief experience with the Viewty was hardly a revelation.

Instead of bringing any revolutionary upgrades, the LG Viewty Smart is there to simply expand the LG S-class portfolio in a camera-centric direction. The LG Arena has quite a nice camera as well, but a 5 megapixel sensor is no longer flagship stuff these days.

Since the LG Viewty Smart retains almost the same compact dimensions as the LG Arena, fitting the bigger camera module, called for a certain downgrade of the other features. In this case, it was obviously the 3.5mm audio jack and the FM transmitter that got axed.

Still, the LG GC900 Viewty Smart certainly has the potential of becoming a bestseller and we really hope to see more of it, once it gets to the final production stage.