LG Viewty Smart (GC900)

By Damian Koh, CNET Asia
Aug 20, 2009

Also known as the GC900, the Viewty Smart picks up where the earlier Viewty left off, with a higher-resolution 8-megapixel camera, an S-Class user interface and a complete hardware redesign.

Design

Smart would probably be the right word to describe this Viewty model. We like the angular edges which give the handset a rather futuristic and trendy look. The black and brushed-silver tones also work well to complement each other here. On the front, a pair of silver strips flank the 3-inch WVGA (800 x 480) capacitive touchscreen. Like the iPhone, there's only one hardware button at the front. Pressing this cancels any active menus and brings you back to the Home screen.

Around the back, the 8-megapixel camera is accompanied by an LED light. The former doesn't have a lens cover and the module is almost flush with the chassis, so fingerprint smudges are inevitable. This does affect the picture quality marginally when you're viewing the images at 100 percent magnification, so we'd advise making it a habit to wipe the lens before you start snapping.

The Viewty Smart doesn't come with a 3.5mm audio jack. Instead, the proprietary port takes care of the bundled headset and cable connection to the PC. Elsewhere, you can find the usual assortment of power/hold key, volume control, camera shutter, microSD expansion card slot and a dedicated button for the onscreen 3D shortcut cube. Holding down the latter activates the multitasking menu.

Features

Like the Crystal and Arena that came before it, the Viewty Smart runs on the proprietary S-Class user interface that features a 3D cube which you can flick to access four different Home screens. The visuals are spectacular and they extend into various sub-menus of the phone as well, but we don't find the cube feature particularly useful. In fact, it's an additional step to get to the Home screens. The variety of widgets is still limited, although we expect that to grow when more developers get on the platform since LG will be using the same UI across its high-end devices. That in itself could be an incentive for developers. Smart dialing is available from the dial pad, but to make a video call you'll have to go to the main menu and select the video call function. We feel this is an unnecessary hassle.

The built-in accelerometer is snappy enough in adjusting the screen orientation between portrait and landscape modes, although you can't use it to silence calls. It's equally responsive in the Gallery application that lets you view pictures/videos in the standard grid format or the more visually attractive 3D view in landscape mode. The Viewty Smart supports multitouch and you can use it to resize images, documents and zoom in on Web pages. For the latter, our experience wasn't as fluid as Safari on the iPhone as lag was noticeable before the screen responded to our actions. The device supports both HSDPA and Wi-Fi, so you can surf the Web via these two wireless connections. There's 1.5GB of onboard memory and you can increase that with a microSDHC (up to 32GB) flash media.

Various text input methods are supported. These include an onscreen alphanumeric keypad, full QWERTY keyboard and handwriting option. Although we could get up to speed with the former two, we can't say they offer the best experiences. We find the alphanumeric keypad narrow on the width and the QWERTY keyboard short on the height. In the latter, our thumbs easily covered two rows which made it hard to tap on one letter. Threaded messaging is available for those who like to view their SMSes in a chat conversation format.

Aside from common public email accounts such as Gmail, you can also get emails and synchronize your Outlook calendar, contacts and tasks via Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync. To do that, you'll first need to create an account via the Email button. You'll also need to know your server address and domain name, as well as your username and password. However, the synchronization process doesn't happen automatically for all the apps. You have to manually select the synchronization setting within Calendar and Contacts. So while support for Microsoft Exchange is available, it could be better integrated across the software. Although it's not available as a discrete application, the Viewty Smart comes with the Picsel File Viewer that lets you read Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint documents and PDF files.

Tags: E-mail, Apple iPhone, Microsoft Corp., Keyboard, Video Call

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