LG KF510 Review

Camera:
The LG phones are notorious for the quality of the pictures made by their cameras. That’s why we were quite reserved when approaching the KF510’s camera. Its interface is rather well designed and is easy to use. In the upper part, we have the shooting mode indicators, the autofocus, the flash, the picture stabilizer, and the battery indicator. The bottom shows you the resolution chosen, the storage location, and how many more pictures you can take. The right side of the viewfinder is taken by a shortcut to the Album and a fast access menu to the flash, the countdown timer, the multi shot option, the white balance, the color effects and the exposure compensation.

However, not all is as user-friendly as it looks. The flash is unpractical, since it doesn’t remain in the same mode, once you have turned it on, and you’ll have to activate it again during the next time you start the interface.

For a 3-megapixel camera with autofocus, the quality of the pictures made outdoors, is quite low. The colors are monotonous and unreal, and typically for a phone, when seen in real size the images are slightly blurry, due to the noise reduction system. The results from the pictures taken indoors are not much different. The only thing, which didn’t disappoint us, was the flash – it is bright enough and illuminates the objects photographed very well.


The videos made with the camera have a maximum resolution of 320 x 240 pixels, but overall, are low quality as well.

In general, we are disappointed from this element of the phone. Currently, there are many mid-range mobile devices on the market, which offer a much better quality. The pictures made with KF510 can be used to show where and whom you’ve been with, to record the image of a loved one or a memorable moment, but do not expect them to be of high quality.


Multimedia:

In the Multimedia sub-menu, you will find the music player, the Camera and the Camcorder, the FM radio and the Dictaphone. The MP3 player can be activated by pressing its dedicated button, which is located on the right side of the KF510. Then, you can sort tracks by My playlist, Artists, Albums, Genres or just play All songs. The interface of the player is nothing impressive, but is user friendly. In the bottom part of the screen are visualized the options, belonging to the touch pad keys with the time bar and the track information over them. There is an animated visualization of the frequencies, which is quite unreal and as if shows everything with a very big delay. You also have the options to play the tracks shuffled, in order, with an equalizer or in the background. In contrast to other models, in the last mode, there is no option to control the player from the main screen.



The video player has no separate icon in the menu and it is started when you choose a video. Its interface is similar to the one of the music player. Naturally, you are able to watch your favorite videos on the entire screen, but they have to be in MPEG4 or H.263 format and their resolution has to be equal or lower than the one of the screen (320 x 240).



Software:

This LG phone is equipped with software, which opens Word files, Excel tables, PowerPoint presentations (as long as they are not made with Microsoft Office 2007) and PDF documents. Unfortunately, you are not able to smoothly scroll as in the menus, and the zooming in is performed at a slow speed.

Since LG KF510 supports JAVA MIDP 2.0, you are capable of using applications, made for that platform.