Camera Phones Plaza

The LG KG320 forms the bar-style entry into LG's Black Label series of slim and sleek mobile phones. Measuring only 9.9mm (0.39") thick, the KG320 certainly looks the part, and with a casing made out of a mix of stainless steel and plastic, the phone oozes class and quality.

This candy bar style phone is equipped with a 1.3 megapixel camera, along with 128MB of onboard memory, making it a real beauty with brains. The KG320 is a triband (GSM 900/1800/1900MHz) phone, and features GPRS connectivity.

The 262k color display on the KG320 has a resolution of 176x220 pixels. It is adequately bright and readable under sunlight. Nothing to shout or complain about here.

The LG KG320's 1.3 megapixel camera is capable of capturing images in five different resolutions - 72x72, 220x176, 320x240, 640x480, and 1280x960. The KG320 provides quite an impressive range of settings for you to tweak with. Brightness can be adjusted to one of five settings, white balance can be set to auto, cloudy, incandescent, fluorescent, or daylight, and a 4x digital zoom is provided. In order to zoom, however, you need to change the resolution of the picture first.

Changing it to 640x480 will allow you to zoom 2x, and changing it to 320x240 will allow you to zoom up to the maximum 4x. This was extremely cumbersome, since it involved so many steps just to get a zoom. Additional effects such as sepia, black and white, and negative color tones are also available. A big letdown here is the time the camera takes to activate - the user is left waiting for three seconds before the camera starts, and shutter lag is an agonizing three seconds on top of that.

The conclusion is that the LG KG320 is a pretty capable phone. For its looks alone, I am very tempted to give it a Highly Recommended rating. However, LG's user interface still needs a lot of work, and the lag in the camera menu, along with the shutter lag, really need to be improved on. If you can live with these minor niggles, the KG320 could be the phone for you, especially with its attractive form factor, but can only manage a Recommended rating from us.

Read full review on mobileburn.

Alltel's LG AX490 is a lackluster cell phone with one bright spot: a great keypad. Though there's really no other reason I can see that you'd want to buy this handset, the cell's FasTap keypad is a major step forward for texting on small phones.

PcMag reviewd the LG AX490 and here's what they say: Flip open the phone and innovation jumps out at you. You'll find Digit Wireless's FasTap keypad, which sports little letter keys, in alphabetical order, at the corners of the number keys on a traditional phone keypad. Three additional keys along the bottom handle shift, space, and symbols.

The keypad may look like a potential minefield of mistyping, but it actually works quite well because of a simple rule: If a letter key is mashed along with its adjacent number key, the number key wins. The little domed letter keys, meanwhile, are separated well enough that mistyping isn't an issue.

FasTap is well integrated into the AX490's interface, which is nice. You can dial, say, 212-PE6-5000 using a combination of letters and numbers, and pow, you'll be connected to the Hotel Pennsylvania at 736-5000. In the contacts list, hitting a letter key makes you jump to contacts beginning with that letter. And, of course, the keypad makes texting and IMing a joy (though it's a little slower than you'd expect, because it isn't a true QWERTY keyboard).

Unfortunately, the AX490 isn't a very good phone. Reception roaming on Verizon's network displayed decent numbers, but the AX490 dropped a few calls where the LG Chocolate VX8500 was able to keep them—and the Chocolate doesn't even have the world's best reception. In addition, I found sound quality using Verizon's network to be harsh and indistinct. The earpiece is quite loud, but the speakerphone is too quiet to use outdoors, and the microphone captures a lot of background noise. It's also annoying that the speakerphone doesn't work with the flip closed.

The phone's two screens are bright, but low-res, with the main screen clocking in at 128 by 160 pixels. Unfortunately, the external screen doesn't work as a camera viewfinder, nor does it show picture caller ID with the flip closed. Another disappointment is that AX490's Bluetooth wireless networking is crippled in ways that Verizon users will find familiar: You can use headsets and dial-up networking and transfer contact cards, but you are not allowed to send files, ringtones, or pictures over Bluetooth. In addition, there's no way to sync the phone with a PC.

The LG AX490 lacks an e-mail program, and the bundled WAP browser seemed cramped on the screen. These are both big downers because FasTap would have worked well with those applications. Browsing also was annoyingly slow on the AX490. The VGA camera takes soft-ish stills with hideous compression artifacts, and it doesn't record video. There's no memory card or MP3 music player, though there's an impressive 40MB of space for pictures, MP3-quality ringtones, and games.

Read full review on pcmag.

There has been a camera phone war going on this summer, with the introduction of the Sony Ericsson K800i, Nokia N73 and N93, and the LG KG920. The list is not going to stop here, though; we are still waiting for devices from Samsung, Benq-Siemens, and ASUS. LG showed off its first 5 megapixel cameraphone, the SV550 (also known as the KV5500 and LP5500) back in May 2005, and since then, its PR mailbox had been flooded with enthusiastic petitions asking for a GSM clone. It has taken the company more than a year of hesitation before introducing the SV550's GSM counterpart, KG920, outside Korea. This delay is mainly due to the shortage of suitable camera modules, especially when domestic demand was so high. Production cost also plays a role, due to both the camera module and the Qualcomm MSM6500 chipset that the phone is based around being so expensive.

After the success of the Chocolate series of handsets, LG hopes to ride on the wave of its suddenly increased brand awareness, and launch the "ultimate" camera phone. Today we will see if the KG920 can live up to the company's expectations.

The KG920's camera specifications appear top notch on paper: a 5 megapixel CCD sensor, autofocus, and Xenon flash. Before going on to how the photos came out, let's talk about the camera application itself.

Typically, it takes slightly more than 2 seconds for the camera application to start. The camera screen is very informative, but you can turn off all the icons if you find them distracting. The camera menu contains almost all the settings you can find on an average consumer digital camera. You can make use of various shooting modes such as night and sports depending on the situation, and you can pick the most accurate white balance setting from incandescent, fluorescent, sunny, cloudy, or shade. You can also specify the ISO setting, selectable from ISO100, 200, and 400. You can apply frames and filters if you wish.

The camera also gives you options for red eye reduction and whether on not the flash will fire. Popular tools such as a self-timer and date stamps are all in place. LG also gives you access to more advanced settings such as autofocus and metering modes (average or centre) if you are into that kind of thing. If you can't be bothered with all the settings, you can simply set everything to auto. I do need to mention the sluggish response in the camera menus, though, which is the same problem found on the older LG P7200. This has destroyed an otherwise pleasant experience with the well-designed application.

The 5 megapixel sensor allows you to shoot at resolutions up to 2592x1944 pixels. The video mode isn't weak either, recording at a decent 320x240 and at a smooth 30fps. (sample videos here). Depending on the amount of compression you choose, a 5 megapixel photo ranges from 250KB to 2MB. In terms of speed, the camera takes less than 2 seconds to focus, and about 7 seconds to resume to camera mode including saving a 2MB file.

The KG920 is a strong performer in terms of Multimedia. The camera quality is amongst the top in the market today. The wide range of music formats supported pleasantly surprises me. Of course, the phone is not without its bad spots: we would love to see some kind of picture editing tools and background MP3 playing capabilities in the future.

Rerad full review on mobileburn.

LG Mobile (LG) announces the arrival of the slender, black LG L343i clamshell. Featuring the i-mode service exclusive to O2, the LG L343i allows instant access to the internet at the touch of a button.

The dedicated i-mode service, allowing instant access to the internet while on the move, means that booking a holiday, checking out what’s on at the cinema or choosing an outfit for a night out couldn’t be easier. Accessed directly from a devoted button on the phone, the i-mode service also allows i-mail and MMS messages at the touch of a button to ensure friends and family are never out of reach.

Weighing just 86g, the LG L343i is lightweight and compact with an array of features to suit those who live life on the move. Alongside an inbuilt digital camera with flash and 4x zoom to capture holiday snaps and nights out, the handset also boasts a stunning internal colour display to view photos and MMS messages and an external colour screen which displays caller ID without even opening the phone.

Via 3g.co.uk.