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.