LG KS20 Review

Camera:

The KS20 is equipped with a camera standard for a smartphone, not intended to be “the perfect” cameraphone – 2-megapixels with autofocus and LED flash. Starting it up you’ll have to wait approximately 3 seconds till the interface, which is in a landscape mode, loads. The settings icons are located in the top left side and on the right there is an indicator of the memory available, instead of showing the number of pictures remaining. The white balance setting bar is in the bottom part and there are two shortcuts – for changing the camera and its setting.
Focusing on an object takes about 3 seconds and taking the picture and saving it takes 5 additional seconds. The total of 8 seconds it takes between two frames is rather slow. The pictures are with an average for a 2 megapixel camera quality, with a good detail, but somewhat blurry when inspected at 100%. The colors are realistic, but not saturated enough, which makes the images look grayish and monotonous.



A camcorder is also present, with option to record in QVGA (320x240), QCIF (176x144) and Sub-QCIF (128x96) resolutions. The quality of the videos is very low, since the frame rate is very low too.

LG KS20 sample video at 320x240 pixels resolution


Multimedia:

The LG KS20 is equipped with the standard mobile version of Windows Media Player 10 which is a multimedia player for music and video files. The phone supports quite many music and video formats: MP3, AAC, AMR, WAV, MP4, WMV, 3GPP. After updating the library with files, all supported types are found, and they can be added to playlists. This function is not well implemented and organizing them is quite hard. Songs can be viewed by artist, album and genre, as these are taken from the ID3 tag of the files.


We recommend converting videos to MPEG4 using h.263 codec with a quality lower than 512kbps, otherwise the video will be skipping when in full-screen mode and there will be skipped frames.

You can’t really enjoy quality music with the new LG KS20, since it only has one small speaker, which if at maximum volume makes an awful sound. This could be expected from a phone which is not designed for music in the first place, so we switched on the earpieces of the set with the hope of making things better.

Luckily what we heard on through the earpieces was not that bad, but when at maximum the result wasn’t good. That’s why we recommend using the earpieces for wired handsfree mainly. In order to get a better sound, additional Bluetooth or wired stereo accessories can be used.

The KS20 has a FM radio with RDS, which uses the headphone' cable as an antenna for receiving signals. This function is pretty convenient, especially in moments when you’ve had enough of the music uploaded on the device.

Software:

The phone has a 128 MB RAM and 256 ROM Internal memory, which capacity can be extended through an additional microSD card. Regrettably the task manager is missing in the KS20 and in order to stop all the loaded applications at once you’ll have to use the standard one that comes with WM6 or you can download one from a third-party sources .

Windows Mobile for PPC provides unlimited capabilities for installing software and the only restrictions are the memory available and the hardware of the phone. The first problem is easily solved by getting a memory card as there are microSD cards with capacity of up to several GB. Every WM6 Professional phone comes with programs that are modified, “pocket” versions known PC applications. Such programs are the mobile versions of (Microsoft) Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Internet Explorer, Explorer, Media Player, etc. The Office applications allow you to view and edit documents of the most-used types and the phone opens them without any error. Even a complicated Excel document with a few sheets is not a problem. Unfortunately there is no PDF reader installed and you’ll have to download an additional application to use that format.

There are numerous programs created for this platform, almost as much as the ones intended for PCs with Windows operating system. The most popular are the various utilities for personalizing the PPC, multimedia players, file explorers, Instant Messengers, etc. You can download third party applications to be used instead of the preloaded ones.

We were very disappointed when we tried Skype. While having a conversation, the sound was breaking out at both ends of the line and we weren’t able to understand anything. This is due to the device being low on resources. Chatting was ok but that is not the purpose of the program. Despite the load we had no problems utilizing the other functions of the phone.