LG Viewty Snap Review

Introduction:

LG was one of the first to take touchscreen technology to mainstream phones, and it continues to rest on these laurels. With the LG Viewty Snap it aims to have created a no-frills feature phone, which, as the name suggests, targets the casual shutterbugs out there.


Design:

The LG Viewty Snap is mainly made of black or silver plastic with chrome-like surrounding band, it is very light and comfortable to hold. The screen is 3”, of the resistive type, with a fairly decent 240x400 pixels resolution. Colors are looking good, despite that it only supports 262 144 of them. Where it fails, though, is the screen responsiveness. Spoiled from capacitive technology nowadays, we have almost forgotten that on some touchscreens you have to press firmly to register, or use your fingernails to scroll – but the LG Viewty Snap really reminded us how tough the beginning was. Setting the display brightness on maximum makes the screen legible enough in direct sunlight.


You can compare the LG Viewty Snap with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

The navigation is complemented by three buttons underneath the screen, which are backlit in white. The middle one serves to call up your favorite and most used applications, and the end button also serves to take you to the homescreen if you are buried somewhere in the menus. Traveling around the phone we see the charging/syncing microUSB port on the left, the power/lock button and the standard audio jack on the top, as well as the dedicated camera button and the volume rocker on the right side. All the keys have enough travel click to be considered comfortable to use.


The main feature of the LG Viewty Snap – the 5MP camera with LED flash – is housed in the upper left corner on the back. It is with Schneider-Kreuznach lens, and is surrounded by a large bezel that almost makes you think the phone has optical zoom with its size and the way it is protruding from the back – but it doesn't really.

Interface and functionality:

The A-Class interface of LG resembles very much a simplified TouchWiz de Samsung, and we are not going to argue which has been first here. There are three homescreens which are prepopulated, and the typical dock at the bottom with shortcuts to your applications. On the default homescreen you can place  widgets, the second hosts LG's Livesquare feature, which is a visually fun way to present your recent communication history with people as avatars, and the last homescreen is reserved for eight  of your favorite contacts. The most useful additional widgets are the Facebook and weather ones.


The main menu is executed as a grid of icons, the applications are categorized in four sections as on other LG handsets – Communication, Entertainment, Utilities and Settings – and these sections span on two pages. The phonebook allows searching for contacts, and there is a smartdial functionality in the dialpad screen, which narrows the range of possible contacts with each letter you type.

The Organizer hub has a Calendar and Tasks applications in it - both barebones, but simple for creating a reminder to an event, or a quick task. Setting up an alarm is cleverly done via pressing the big clock on the homescreen and quickly typing in the time right on the spot. We had no issues with the other standard applications LG has included – calculator, memo, voice recorder, drawing panel, etc. - except for their speed of execution.


One major worry about the interface is the lag – we already mentioned that it takes time and effort for the screen to register a touch, but even afterwards things happen indecently slow.

Messaging:

The LG Viewty Snap asks for your email details right in the initial setup, and fixing our Gmail account was easy. The email application supports push technology, and can download up to 1MB of email content and attachments, which is about right for an entry level feature phone. Thankfully, there is a preinstalled document viewer for reviewing MS Office formats and PDF files, Unfortunately the lag we talked about in the interface, translates itself into the on-screen QWERTY keyboard as well. It is uncomfortable to type on the smallish 3” screen with lag. The same issue goes for the text messaging application – decent interface and functionality, but plagued by laggy response. On top of that, since there is no accelerometer, you have to switch keyboard orientation modes with a button each time.



Connectivity and Data:

The lack of 3G or Wi-Fi leaves you stuck with EDGE data speeds, which makes browsing a very long engagement, not to mention it gave us an error each time we tried to visit a page. There is no GPS module either. You can use LG's own synchronisation software for PC connectivity, though we didn't have any issue with both the phone memory and the microSD card being recognized straight away without having to install the program first.

Camera and Multimedia:

The 5MP camera with LED flash of the LG Viewty Snap is supposed to make us overlook all the drawbacks we mentioned above, considering the entry level price of the handset. The interface has enough settings and shooting modes (including continuous shot) to be considered advanced, and the macro mode can be toggled on or off straight from the initial screen. The handset takes decent photos outdoors in terms of focus and detail, but the colors come out dull and lifeless. Indoor shots turned out noisy, and the flash is not strong enough to illuminate even a fairly close scene properly. Video mode captures choppy 320x240 footage in MPEG-4 format with 15fps. If we forget about the low fps count, the video is with true colors and enough detail.

LG Viewty Snap sample video at 320x240 pixels resolution.





Zooming pictures selected from the gallery grid is done with the plus and minus zoom signs. Speaking of zoom, the LG Viewty Snap is supposed to have the so-called “Optic-all” technology for results resembling optical zoom without loss of quality – the only place that allowed us to use the 2x enlargement, though, was in the camera interface before shooting video.



The music player has a decent functionality, and categorizes your music files by artist, album, genre, or playlists. It even has a search function in all of these sections, and keeps playing in the background while you are doing something else, so no complaints about it, and the phone also offers an FM radio with RDS support, which needs a headset to boot. The loudspeaker on the back is of average strength and sound quality.

There is no dedicated video player icon in the main menu. Video files can be run through the gallery or the file browser, and the phone played MP4 videos with QVGA resolution as promised in the specifications, but that's as far as it goes.

Performance and Conclusion:

Call quality of the LG Viewty Snap was decent in the ear speaker, although voices sounded a bit thin, while the other party was hearing us very well, with natural voice representation.
The 900mAh battery is good for 5.5 hours of talk in 2G mode (not that there is any other mode), and 16 days of standby, as per the company.

If we put all the features of the phone together and compare with the price, we would certainly receive a good value for the money in the end, at least on paper. In reality, though, the poor 60MB of internal memory in total, and slow processor make the interface laggy and unresponsive. Nevertheless, LG slapped a 5MP camera with an LED flash and a lot of shooting options on the device, which takes decent photos. If only the video was better, then we could say that it is worth having the LG Viewty Snap as a budget cameraphone. Unfortunately, for that price, one could get the Samsung Monte feature phone, for instance, which is with way better specs and performance, not to mention pictures and video that are on par with the ones we obtained from the LG Viewty Snap.

LG Viewty Snap Video Review: