LG KF700 Review

Messaging:

For writing messages, you’ll have to rely on the hardware keyboard only. Since the software one can be used for searching the contacts, we find this illogical. In addition, the lack of a handwriting recognition option limits the touch screen’s functions even further. By using it, you’ll only be able to add special symbols and punctuation marks, to turn off/on the T9 predictive text feature and to select the imput method.

If you include multimedia content such as a picture or tone, the message will turn from an ordinary SMS to a MMS.

KF700 has a e-mail IMAP4/POP3 client, but it doesn’t offer to automatically setup an account, even one in the popular web mail servers, which is annoying for such a versatile device.


Connectivity:

To our great regret KF700 is not fully usable in the U.S. It is tri-band GSM/EDGE (900/1800/1900 MHz) with single-band (2100MHz) UMTS/HSDPA 3.6/7.2 MBps, making it suitable only for the European market.

The full HTML Internet browser is one of the best features of the phone and is one of the best on the market. It loads heavy sites (such as phonarena.com) correctly without any problems. There are options for full screen, landscape or portrait orientation and for zooming out (by using the wheel, so the whole site can be visualized) and then zooming in a particular part of the page. What we dislike, is the way one moves through the page: although we are already used to operating the phone, scrolling in any direction works but is far from the iPhone, which is much more adequate. Strangely, when you have to input text in landscape mode, a full QWERTY appears, which is very convenient, but is not present anywhere else. We would love to have it as an input method when writing a message.


For local connectivity, KF700 uses Bluetooth or a cable, which regrettably, is not standard mini or microUSB. Naturally, an IrDA port is not present, since it’s an extinct feature on the market. The phone lacks a WiFi support, the presence of which in a non-smart device is rare. It is strange that in this model, coming out in the middle of 2008, LG repeats the Viewty mistake and employs a Bluetooth modul version 1.2 (instead of the current 2.0). The difference in the transfer rate of large files is considerable. At least the phone has the profiles required for Stereo Audio distribution over Bluetooth.


The package also includes a mini disk with LG PC Suite. It is used for synchronization of the contacts, messages and files on the phone with a computer, via Bluetooth or a cable. In order to do that, you have to switch the phone to data connection mode. There are two more options – music synchronization (which only discovers the songs on the phone and in the specific folder on the card) and data storage device (which lets you browse only the memory card). Unfortunately, these options do not automatically appear on the screen when you plug in a cable but you have to select them from the main menu, which is not very convenient.