Foreword, box contents
Many of you might nor even know that the first handset without a keypad on front, optimized for finger-contol has been LG Prada – of course it’s also true that combo handsets based on Windows Mobile and PalmOS have been available much before this model, but it’s still a fact that the first “normal” phone has been created by LG. And how here’s the successor, and we could say that it’s just a clone, since it’s looks exactly like the original phone, it just has a sliding QWERTY keyboard – and some software tuning.
Prada is an Italian fashion company, named in 1999, after Miuccia Prada, born in 1949 – the lady is otherwise one of the richest persons on the world. Their history goes way back the aforementioned date, as the first shop of the company acquired by the Prada-family in 1979, has opened in 1919 in Milan, and back then they were only into leather clothes. Now, they are one of the largest fashion brands on Earth, their name might not be as well-known in our region, as they have no shops around here – those who fell the need to but something in a Prada store have to go to Italy or Germany, as that’s the closest place where they can find one. The brand might still be familiar, as in 2006 a highly acclaimed “comedy” premiered in the movies with the title The devil wears Prada, with Meryl Streep as the lead actress. The movie is otherwise based on Lauren Weisbereger’s novel from 2003.
So LG Prada II should be a luxury phone, based on its name, but it’s not, I’d rather call it a high-end multimedia device, we might even consider it as a rival of iPhone. Its price is currently about 455 euros, and for this sum one might not get even a coat in the Prada store in Milan, so it’s an interesting fact that such a handset has the name of the company. We’ve received the phone from XXL GSM, the box is rather small, it doesn’t have any diamonds or unique materials, it’s just like the one of any other LG handset’s. The list of accessories isn’t very long either, besides the charger, the headset and the leather case we only get a piece of cloth used for cleaning the screen. We will probably need this, as no matter being a second generation model, the new Prada is also a fingerprint-magnet. And also a collector of scratches.
Exterior
We would not like to make irresponsible statements, but I think it’s quite probable that LG had huge stocks of black and silver lacquered plastics, as Prada II is not the first handset to be made of such materials. Besides the predecessor KS20 also looks like this, which is otherwise one of the cheapest Windows Mobile combo handset on the market, which tells a lot about what kind of materials have been used to make. Of course I can’t say that the subject of our review is ultra-low quality, but it’s quite weak for this price, the Prada logo on the front looks really strange…
The new phone got quite fat compared to its predecessor. Its size is 104.5 x 54 x 16.8 mm (compared to the original Prada’s size of 98.8 x 54 x 12 mm), it weighs exactly 130 grams, so it has no chance to win the award for being ultra-compact – and otherwise, it’s not small even for a model with a QWERTY keyboard. It’s not advised to keep it in the pocket of our jeans, it’s impossible in a shirt’s pocket, although it might just fit in a Prada coat. The front is just like on the KE850: a large display with a black border surrounding it. Okay, the basic “accessories” are here, there is a speaker on top besides the secondary camera used for video calls, while on the bottom there are three buttons. The display has a diagonal of 3”m a resolution of 240 x 400 pixels, so we won’t get anything new in this matter.
The back is minimalist just like the other parts, practically the only noteworthy part is the 5 megapixel camera. Since it’s an LG model, the lens is from Schneider-Kreuznach, there is a very faint label painted on the plastic part telling this. The part that can be taken off is rather large and it comes off very easily, so if we put the handset in our pocket upside down and want to take it out, it might happen that the piece of plastic comes off.
On the top there is the charger/headset connector, of course it’s again a proprietary LG connector, there’s no sign of microUSB. On the right there is the microSD slot and three buttons: keypad lock, favorites menu and camera shoot key. On the bottom there is the mic, while on the left there are the volume control keys and the hook for the wristband.
The most interesting part is of course the 39-key QWERTY keyboard appearing after sliding the phone open. The engineers did a great job with this, the keys have an appropriate size and pressure point in order to allow fast and comfortable typing, the backlight is completely uniform, it looks really cool in the dark. The only problem is with the layout, for example there is no exclamation mark, we can’t even access it with shift or secondary mode, which is strange since we can type every kind of parenthesis we can imagine.
Menu structure
The base of the operating system on the handset is the software from the original Prada, but it has more services than any predecessor having this OS, and this includes Renoir as well. Of course there has been a need for improvement, as we’ll be using the WQVGA display, thanks to the display, in landscape and portrait mode as well.
First I’d like to note the default wallpapers, which are dynamically changing by default, so we can always look at a different one, whenever we unlock the keypad. The screenshots above show the lighter ones, although even these remind me of a surreal nightmare, they have clothes and people without heads, it’s terrible. The most frightening ones are the Italian model ladies born to Alien parents. If a child gets to see one of these, he’ll instantly stop growing, that’s sure. As we have minor readers as well, the most terrifying UFO lady can be seen only by clicking here - viewer discretion advised!
The standby screen is very cool and useful. It’s a cube with three sides (what a logical bug), the first time we’ve seen such a thing on a mobile platform has been in the case of the first generation HTC TouchFLO, but Macintosh and Linux owners probably also know what am I talking about. We can scroll with our finger, one of the three sides is the quicklaunch menu you can see on the picture, the second is a blank something with a Prada logo, while the third one is a Widgets tab. Of course by pressing the favorites button on the phone’s side we can pop up a customizable quicklaunch menu.
The main menu can be accessed by tapping the four-dotted icon in the bottom right corner. There are three other icons over here, the first opens the dial screen, the second takes us to the contact list, while the third one opens messaging. The main menu has icons, it has four tabs, all of them 2 x 4 menu items, so it’s easy to browse it with a finger as well. For entering data we should rely on the QWERTY keyboard, but if only one of our hands is free or we don’t want to open the handset, we can use a virtual numeric keypad as well.
The big question is what will happen with the menu when we open the QWERTY keyboard. Well, in this case a different standby screen pops up, which you can see on the picture above. This has a “wheel” layout, it can be rotated with a finger and has seven icons. We can of course access the main menu and other stuff in this landscape view as well.
Software and features
There aren’t any serious lacks of the PIM features. From the menu we can access a world clock - even though it has no graphics –, there is a notepad and a voice recorder too, this has no size limitations for recording. In the tools menu we have a calculator, a unit- and currency converter, and a stopwatch as well, the only thing missing is a timer. The calendar is rather intelligent, because it has a date search feature, which makes finding entries easier. It has month, week and day views as well, we can enter meetings, anniversaries and birthdays and we can also note when we are on a holiday.
At the entertainment tab we can see the gallery, which can switch between pictures really fast. Of course our multimedia contents can be accessed from the file browser as well. The handset supports basic document formats (xls, doc, ppt, pdf) and flash files as well. We have an interesting application called Muvee studio, which lets us create “spectacular” videos from our pictures. Our creativity might be limited by the fact that there are less than a dozen schemes available, but I have still made a video in order to demonstrate the program’s capabilities, you can download it here (318 kB, 3GP format).
As for games, the offer is poor. We have something called Championship, which has the name Golf championship after launch. This can be controlled with the touchscreen in a really unique way, I couldn’t finish the first level in five minutes, so I didn’t play with it any more. The other two games are created under the sign of total senselessness: there is a dice rolling program, if we shake the Prada the software rolls with two dices, and that’s it. The second is even more stupid, Wheel mania, which can be controlled by shaking or by fingers, we can roll a wheel, which has the card symbols on it with a joker in bonus, or the rock/paper/scissor symbols. The results of the rolls are tracked by the phone, although I don’t see any reason in that.
Everything related to phone calls
Unfortunately there is a problem related to phone calls: the microphone is turned on only after a couple of seconds after the connection has been established and until then the speaker is just hissing, we can’t hear what the other party has to say. For this reason all calls made with Prada 2 started with a “hallo, hallo, hello, hi” string, which might be a usual thing after a time, but it has been rather annoying during the test period. Otherwise sound quality is okay during calls and the LG sounds good through handsfree as well.
The phonebook offers lots of extra fields to fill in when adding a new contact, staring from birthday and going to all kinds of addresses/numbers. We can have 1000 contacts, which is not very much. Messaging is okay, the handset supports MMS and emails as well, authenticated IMAP servers and attachments are being ok as well.
In terms of data transfer the little LG performs very good. The GSM module is quad-band (850/900/1800/1900 MHz), so we can use the handset all around the world. For data transfer we can use GPRS, EDGE, UMTS and 7.2 Mbps HSDPA as well, of course if we have a data plan. If we don’t have one we can use WiFi as well, the browser supports HTML sites, it’s quite easy to use, but it’s not even close to the Safari on iPhone. Bluetooth is of version 2.1, it supports stereo sound transfer, and the LG data port works with USB 2.0, at least in theory.
Multimedia
The camera’s resolution is 5 megapixels, it has autofocus, the highest available resolution is 2560 x 1920 pixels in the case of images, while we can record videos at 720 x 480 pixels – we can opt for a VGA resolution as well, if we don’t want widescreen videos. We have the usual set of settings, as the camera’s software is the same as on other models based on this platform. Light metering is missing, we can set other functions like white balance, sensitivity (ISO 100 – ISO 800) etc. There is a software image stabilizer as well, we can take panorama pictures and image sequences as well. There is no smile focusing, face recognition or increased dynamics range, we can’t turn off camera sounds either, this latter one might be the only real negative one.
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Unfortunately the quality of the images is not a rival of those made with currently available camera phones, but it’s still pretty much usable. If we compare Prada’s pictures to those of the best 8 or 5 megapixel phones’ we can say that LG’s phone blurs out image edges, has quite a high level of noise and the colors are rather pale as well. The situation is not much better in the case of movies either, as the phone can record them at 30 fps – here’s a test video (2 MB, 3GP format)
We won’t get any extra in terms of music, the default headset is pretty good, but it’s nothing special, and we can say quite the same about the handsfree speaker as well. The music player can run in the background, it can display album covers and can filter tracks by ID3 tags, but it has no equalizer. There is an FM radio, which of course works only if the headset is plugged in, but then it’s great.
Battery and summary
The battery has a capacity of 950 mAh and it can be switched. Although I didn’t expect much, based on this capacity, but it kept the handset online for two days, even though I have never turned on WiFi.
The new LG Prada is basically a very good handset, but it has its problems, so I can’t give it a recommended award. The sound delay during calls is very annoying and I think such a thing should not be possible, we hope that a software update will fix it, but I still cannot understand how the engineers couldn’t notice this in the factory. Another problem is that it’s too expensive, at this price it should clearly be a premium category phone, although the materials used and the assembly quality are no sign of this. The third thing is that it’s too thick and large. Otherwise it has lots of features, the menu structure is good and if these bugs will disappear than we’ll be very happy.
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| LG KF900 Prada 2 |
Bocha
Translated by Szaszati
LG Prada 2 has been provided by XXL GSM. The handset can be purchased at:
Budapest VI. Jókai tér 6.
Budapest VI. Teréz körút 18.
On-line at www.xxlgsm.hu.
Specifications
| LG KF900 Prada 2 | ||
 | General | |
| Technology | GSM/UMTS | |
| Size | 104.5 x 54 x 16.8 mm | |
| Weight | 130 grams | |
| Available colors | Black | |
| Display | ||
| Display diagonal | 3” | |
| Display resolution | 240 x 400 pixels | |
| Display type | TFT | |
| Number of colors | 262,000 | |
| Memory | ||
| Phonebook capacity | 1000 | |
| SMS memory / max. MMS size | ? / 300 KB | |
| Internal memory | 60 MB | |
| Memory expandability | microSD (SDHC-compatible) | |
| Data transfer | ||
| Frequency bands | 850/900/1800/1900 MHz | |
| GPRS / EDGE | Class 10 (4+1/3+2) / Class 10 (236.8 kbps) | |
| UMTS / HSDPA | yes / 7.2 Mbps | |
| IrDA / Bluetooth | no / 2.1 (A2DP too) | |
| WiFi | yes (802.11b/g) | |
| USB | 2.0 | |
| Push-to-talk / RSS | no / no | |
| GPS receiver | no | |
| Basic functions | ||
| Profiles | yes | |
| Vibra funkció | van | |
| Built-in handsfree | yes | |
| Voice dialing / voice commands | no / no | |
| Voice recorder | yes (no time limit) | |
| Alarm clock | yes, also when turned off | |
| Predictive text entry | T9 | |
| Software | ||
| Platform | LG touch-controlled | |
| WAP / HTML browser | 2.0 / yes | |
| E-mail client | yes (POP3, IMAP4, authenticated) | |
| Java | yes, MIDP 2.0 | |
| Games | 1 + 2 shake-controlled | |
| Currency converter | yes | |
| Extra software | Muvee Studio | |
| Multimedia | ||
| Main camera | 5 megapixels, autofocus, LED flash | |
| Secondary camera | yes | |
| Video recording | yes (max. 720 x 480 pixels @ 30 fps) | |
| Music player | yes, can run in background | |
| Equalizer | no | |
| FM radio | yes | |
| Battery | ||
| Main battery | 950 mAh Li-Ion | |
| Standby time | 400 hours | |
| Talk time | 3 hours | |
| Other | ||
| QWERTY keyboard, gyroscope, TV-out(cable not included) | ||
