The MWC 2008 - Live Report

At the moment we arrived at the airport, we noticed the two new LG phones. The Korean manufacturer is leading a massive advertising company, to popularize its new models. A banner with the LG KF700 and LG KF600 is all over Barcelona.

After the great success of the Viewty (more than 500 000 sold | read the review) LG now determines this is its year for touch-devices. There are three interesting models using some kind of touch technology, but the Koreans always announce lots of phones at such events – there is also a slew of other lower class and less interesting devices.



LG KF700 is a full-touch phone, which means that on its front it has nothing but the 3” wide-angled display with 240x480 pixels resolution. Viewty had send/end and clear keys below it, but it is not so with the KF700, which is not really convenient: sometimes you just want to minimize everything and start over from the homescreen. According to LG, the target group of this phone likes the touch display and interface, but cannot trade the standard hardware numeric keypad for it. So, one is present, once the phone is slid open. Another help for the navigation is the scroll wheel (accessible from the left) coupled with the OK key.

The KF700 is a mass market phone, for those who want the factor of a ‘touch phone’ but don’t want to spend a whole fortune on it. Of course, there are some compromises that had to be made (when compared to Viewty), and this are lower-res camera (3 instead of 5 megapixels) and camcorder, and lack of DivX support. While we are OK with the first, are disappointed for the latter – for us it was what made the phone really worth getting.





The KF600 doesn’t have the ‘full touch’ factor, but a standard QVGA display and a smaller touch-sensitive one (called InteractPad), instead of navigation keys. Here we must note that this ‘new model’ is almost exact copy of the Verizon’s Venus in its design. However, although initially we though LG is cheap (for putting small instead of large touch display), we got the real idea of the phone after a few minutes of using it. Talking about touch navigation area, everything is always at the tip of your finger and single handed usage is zero problem. Thanks to the well designed software, the overall user experience is as of a standard phone, but instead of scrolling up and down through the options, one just taps it in the navigation area. With the ‘full touch’ phones, you have large (about 3-inches) display, so you must move your hand from top to bottom and vice verse. The smart navigation of the menus is not only user friendly, it also looks attractive (similar WOW factor as other Touch displays) but this is not all: the display is full color one and the phone has lots of media content (screensavers, wallpapers) which interact with it, creating very cool look. Coupled with the attractive design, gives the result of a very cool mid-level phone.





KF510 – it is all about style! It is not the third label of the BlackSeries phones (Chocolate and Shine), which will be announced later in the year, and even doesn’t have a name, but definitely attracts attention. Both the front and back surface are of metal, and they are not in a single color but in a unique gradient, that transits from one shade to another. The navigation keys conceal when inactive and the slider mechanism is almost entirely hidden in the back, which helps for the superb design, we are in love with.

The navigation pad here is also not a standard one, but also is not very advanced, as seen above. Like the Chocolates, it is capacitive touch keypad which reacts only to skin touch, instead of physical press from any object. Unlike the Chocolate, the D-pad is not limited to 5 separate keys, but occupies larger area and allows for scrolling: sweep a finger from top to bottom or any other direction but diagonal. The KF510 is a well looking slim phone with decent functionality and is expected to hit the street in March.