Introduction
Another touchscreen phone is here for testing, and it could be stylish to have such a handset for review early this year, as nowadays this is one of the most powerful trends in the mobile phone world. KP500 comes from the same Far-Eastern workshop as the 8 megapixel Renoir, which is LG’s top model. KP500 is the little brother of this model, the design and the menu system structure are quite similar.
The great difference is that KP500 is a much cheaper handset; LG has much experience in this area, as Viewty, Prada or Secret have been based on the same idea. But now, KP500 is one of the first devices that is fully touch-controlled, but it’s also a mid-range phone.
Of course some of the functions are victims of cost reduction, so we can say bye-bye to 3G support, the camera is much simpler and the materials used are also cheaper. That’s what we have to give up to have an estimated price of 140-175 euros for KP500.
Exterior
The box also has a pile of papers, a small CD, a charger, a headset and a data cable besides the phone itself. Usually the first impression of the phone has been that it’s very light, and yeah, that’s correct, the weight of 89 grams is no cruiser weight. This has two reasons: first, the materials used are pure plastic, and although the whole thing is quite thin, it still doesn’t have a bad overall impression, it feels good to take it in our hand. The other reason for the low weight is the small battery, which hasn’t been very promising, but I had a pleasant surprise.
The design is almost a 1:1 Renoir copy, we have the same three rectangular buttons below the display. The 240 x 400 pixels large touchscreen display has a diagonal of 3”, above it we can only see the brand logo and a simple gap that looks like a stripe (this is the speaker). The left and right buttons are for handling calls, while the center key pops up the favorites menu on the standby screen and displays the task manager in other places in the menu.
On the left of KP500 there is LG’s proprietary system connector and the volume control keys, while on the right there is the camera’s hotkey and the keylock button, both under the microSD slot. On top we can oly see the neckband’s hook, while on the bottom there is the microphone’s hole. KP500 comes with a stylus, which is interestingly placed in the bottom right corner, and it’s a telescopic in order to have a proper size.
The back side is simple, the battery is under its bottom part. The top part cannot be taken off, this is where the 3.2 megapixel camera is placed. This sits quite solitary in the corner, as there is no mirror or flash light in its company.
Menu, basic functions
The menu system of KP500 is very much like Renoir’s. On the bottom of the main screen there are four icons: the dial screen, the phonebook, the messages and the main menu (from left to right). Above this bar on the right we can find the widgets, which are all kinds of minor stuff, just as usual. There is an analog and a digital clock, the radio and the music player’s status, quick link to the gallery and the notepad. We can put these widgets wherever we need them on the screen, but if we shake the phone the widgets are ordered in a grid layout, and they just fit the screen even if we put all of them onscreen. This shake control means that there is a gyroscope in the phone, but this works only with a couple of functions.
If we make wide, horizontal strokes with our finger we get to the second page of the main screen, where we can place nine contacts with images. These are of course used for speed dialing. When entering the main menu we get to see the usual LG layout; there are four tabs on the side, the functions are grouped logically. On the bottom there are the basics (phonebook, messages), then there are the multimedia applications, then the PIM functions and finally the settings. There are no themes, this white-red one on a dark background is the only one known by the phone. It is a positive aspect, however, that font size can be set in four steps and the selected size is valid at almost every function, which can be useful for the visually impaired. Here we have a video of the box and the menu system:
The phonebook can store 1000 contacts, an entry can have quite a lot of additional information, like birthday, company, job title, web address and other extras. Contacts can have images, which are displayed in a rather lame manner during an incoming call, as the picture is seen in a rather small thumbnail in the top left corner of the screen, which is a stupid thing to do in case of a 3” display.
I have some serious issues with messaging. Not with the functionality, as we have SMS, MMS and email support as well, but the implementation is problematic. We get a virtual keyboard for text entry by default, it’s not very hard to use, but if we rotate the phone we get a full QWERTY keyboard smiling at us. At first the user smiles back, thinking how cool will it be to enter text with both hands, but it turns out very soon that in spite of the large screen the buttons are too small and we always hit the wrong one. But okay, let’s take out the stylus, but we again need both hands and we don’t have the feeling that we handle thing like the keyboard of a computer.
Unfortunately there is one more problem: over 50 SMS messages makes listing them so slow that it takes away long seconds from our life. And this happens every time the list is refreshed (a new message arrives, we delete one). In this case we might resort to angrily tapping the back button, but the only thing we achieve is that the keyboard buffer stores our taps and when the phone is revived it quickly carries out the commands it received while being half-dead. If there wouldn’t have been this new year’s SMS mania when all of my acquaintances to whom I have ever talked two words sent some one-of-a-dozen message wishing a happy new year and lots of luck, but this helped me to quickly reach the amount of messages that made the software slow down.
PIM functions, games
There is a really nice calendar in the organizer features, which has month and week views as well. Entries can be if three types (anniversary, birthday and meeting), but for God’s sake, a normal man has a birthday only once a year, so I can’t imagine why didn’t this category fit into anniversary, it’s a myth. It would be hard to complain about the alarm clock, it can have more alarm times which can repeat, and snooze time can be up to an hour long. It’s smart that the timer is also placed here, as in case of a new alarm we can’t just define the specific time, but even set a countdown.
The calculator has scientific operations as well, it just takes a tap in the top left corner. The stopwatch and the converter have no extras, and the world clock unfortunately has only a list view, although LG used to draw really cool globes before. We can find a little drawing board too in the PIM features, here we can sketch up some things with the stylus or with our finger and the result can be forwarded in an MMS. A pleasant surprise of the handset is that it has Picsel Viewer, which lets us open Office documents, rtf, text and PDF files.
The gyroscope is activated again in the games. We can have fun with three applications, Pipe is the classical connect-the-parts-cause-water-is-coming stuff with some nice graphics. The second is called Wheel mania, which has no meaning, we can only rotate a wheel of fortune and that’s it. The third is the usual dice throwing thingy, now with some minigames, which make us smile once, but that’s it.
Multimedia
The 3 megapixel camera on the back lacks autofocus, which I think is a huge downside, as otherwise it could have been good. The set of features is enough, we can set size, quality, white balance and environmental setting, there is a self-timer, but we can’t turn off camera sounds. Test pictures coming up:
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The phone is quite advanced musically. It has good sound quality through handsfree, and although the supplied headset is not the “wow” category, but it’s pretty good. But it cannot be taken apart and the headset has no 3.5 mm jack, which is a great downside. The software is okay, it sorts tracks by ID3 tags, the interface is easy to use, the volume can be set in 30 (!) steps, there is an equalizer, although only with preset schemes. The player can of course run in the background.
This is true for the radio as well, which supports RDS. The image gallery is clever, it starts up in a landscape view. Thumbnails are loaded a bit slow, but then we can push around the whole table. If we zoom in on a picture we can switch to the next one with our finger and of course the gyroscope works here as well, so the images are rotates automatically if we tilt the phone. That’s true for the videos as well.
Data transfer, summary
There is no 3G, KP500 supports only GPRS and EDGE. Besides this there is an HTML browser, but if we want a page to fit on screen we really get a microscopical font size, so it’s not very good. The landscape view, however, is available here too.
Locally we have 2.1 stereo Bluetooth and the supplied data cable connects to a USB port of course. The CD in the box has a sync software on it, this lets us operate with phonebook entries and messages. KP500 can be charged from a computer via USB, and after connecting it asks if we want to sync data, used it as a modem or to handle it as an external drive.
The battery under the cover seemed shockingly small, but it kept the phone online for three days without problems, even though this included a wave of new-year SMS messages. Summary? KP500 can be successful because of its price. It’s full of small bugs and lacks, so we can’t give it a Recommended award. The sometimes slow software, the lack of autofocus and 3G… and these are the smaller things. Of course the phone has lots of other things as a compensation, but I don’t know how much would the production cost had been higher if they would have used a normal size caller picture, a headset that can be taken apart, or a small flash on the back… pity for them, but it’s still not bad.
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| LG KP500 Cookie |
Bog
Translated by Szaszati
Specifications
| LG KP500 | ||
 | General | |
| Technology | GSM | |
| Size | 106.5 x 55.4 x 11.9 mm | |
| Weight | 89 grams | |
| Available colors | Brown, black, silver, gold | |
| Display | ||
| Display diagonal | 3” | |
| Display resolution | 240x 400 pixels | |
| Display type | TFT | |
| Number of colors | 262.000 | |
| Memory | ||
| Phonebook capacity | 1000 | |
| SMS memory / max. MMS size | 500 / 295 KB | |
| Internal memory | 48 MB | |
| Memory expandability | microSD (max 8GB) | |
| Data transfer | ||
| Frequency bands | GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz | |
| GPRS / EDGE | Class 10 (4+1/3+2) / present | |
| UMTS / HSDPA | none / none | |
| IrDA / Bluetooth | none / 2.1 (A2DP too) | |
| WiFi | none | |
| USB | 2.0 (proprietary connector) | |
| Push-to-talk / RSS | none / none | |
| GPS receiver | none | |
| Basic functions | ||
| Profiles | present | |
| Vibra function | present | |
| Built-in handsfree | present | |
| Voice dialing / voice commands | none / none | |
| Sound recorder | present | |
| Alarm clock | present, also when turned off | |
| Predictive text entry | T9 | |
| Software | ||
| Platform | LG | |
| WAP / HTML browser | 2.0 / present | |
| E-mail client | present | |
| Java | present, MIDP 2.0 | |
| Games | 3 | |
| Currency converter | present | |
| Extra software | Muvee studio | |
| Multimedia | ||
| Main camera | 3 megapixels, fix focus | |
| Secondary camera | none | |
| Video recording | present (320 x 240 pixels) | |
| Music player | present | |
| Equalizer | present (presets only) | |
| FM radio | present - RDS | |
| Battery | ||
| Main battery | 900 mAh | |
| Standby time | 350 hours | |
| Talk time | 210 minutes | |
| Other | ||
| gyroscope | ||
