LG PRADA KE850 Phone Review

Camera:

LG PRADA is equipped with a 2-megapixel autofocus camera with a flash and lens under the branding of Schneider Kreuznach, which is used in Samsung’s digital cameras, but only in the LG phones.

The camera’s horizontal interface starts in about 3 seconds and then you can take pictures. Your viewfinder is the whole screen and only a small part of its left part is taken up by icons, informing you of the settings. Press anywhere on the screen and you’ll be able to change the settings after selecting the icon with the cogged wheel that says Settings.

There are quite a few settings and their significance is implied in the black-and-white icons, which are rather abstract, so that you’ll have to select them one by one to read about their functions.

An object can be focused in 4 seconds, then taking the picture and saving it takes 5 more seconds, which makes 9 seconds between two frames, which is rather slow. Unfortunately, the quality of the pictures, which is rather disappointing, does not make up for this slowness. For its two megapixels the camera shows a mediocre resolution and the small details are almost not visible even when the pictures have been taken in bright light. When viewed at 100%, the pictures appear smeared by the noise-reduction system. Other shortcomings are the unrealistic, unsaturated colors, which make the pictures look grey and monotonous. A lot of noise is generated when taking pictures in poor light; in darker rooms, when you have to rely on the flash, it lets you down.






The Camcorder allows you to video with a maximum resolution of 400х240 (that of the display); you can also choose QVGA (320x240), CIF (352x288), QCIF and 128x96. The duration is limited by the available memory.

Viewing pictures/video files is done in My Stuff menu. The pictures are seen as miniatures, which you can easily enlarge and view on a full screen. In this mode ‘buttons’ for previous/next pictures and for returning to viewing non-full screen show on the screen when you press on it. You can also view as a slide show.








Music Player:

The music player is equipped with two colorful skins: black and white, with an option for Shuffle&Repeat. The Interface has big buttons and shows the file name and the author’s name, as well as the settings. A bid disadvantage is that you cannot ‘minimize’ it and let it work on the background, while you’re doing something else with the phone. This is rather surprising for us, since nowadays much simpler phones can do that. Other non-available options in this phone, are sorting by author/album/genre, arranging in playlists and equalizers.

The sound through the loudspeaker is not particularly loud and its quality is mediocre. To listen to your music, we recommend that you use either wireless earphones, which is more convenient, or the wire earphones that come with the set. Since they are actually a wire remote control with a 3.5 mm jack, you can connect any standard earphones to the PRADA phone. The ones from the set are black ‘plugs’, bearing the PRADA logo; they are not especially convenient, but their sound and the strength are good. They reproduce he low frequencies poorly, but they do better than most of their competition. Using the 3.5 mm jack, you can connect also very good headphones, which we definitely like.







You have in addition an FM RADIO with a memory for 12 stations. The lacking option for automatic search of just one station is an inconvenience: you have to do that search for all stations or you have to do it manually. You can also listen through the loudspeaker, but even then the headphones have to be plugged in, so that they can serve as an antenna.





Software:

LG Prada is not a smartphone, it works with standard LG software, created especially for this phone. Its in-built memory is only 16 MB, and can be increased by a few GBs, with the help of a microSD card. There are four preloaded games, but others can be added, using JAVA. The four games that come with the phone are very well developed and, being from different genres, they are sure to appeal to everyone. The supplementary application must have been created especially for this phone or for some similar device, because the standard hardware keyboard that all other phones use to navigate in the applications is missing here.

Surprisingly for a phone, which is not a smartphone, the PRADA can open MS office (Word, Excel and PowerPoint), as well as PDF files, thus covering the most common types of documents.