LG KS20 - PDA in the phone

Introduction, packaging

All manufacturers announce from time to time a device that is part of a not so successful series, that don’t offer any innovative new features, but they still arouse the curiosity of some users. LG KS20 is such a phone, about which I have received lots of emails lately. I am happy to announce that we have managed to acquire a sample from XXL GSM, even though it was a bit tough job. At first we have unfortunately received one which had only Slovakian language, and we couldn’t do much with that for obvious reasons, but last week we have received one that knew languages that were easier to understand. I can tell one thing in advance: it was worth the wait!

The market of Pocket PCs has grown a lot in the last few years. Lots of renown manufacturers just couldn’t keep up with this fast growth and have abandoned this competition, while others have appeared from nowhere with devices that made us stare open-mouthed. The situation with LG, who is already an experienced cell phone manufacturer, is something similar. The manufacturer has already launched handheld PCs about ten years ago, but they are not considered as experts in Pocket PCs; they have only a couple of Windows Mobile-based devices on the market. However this might be the very reason for which they could create something with KS20 that no one else did. The company has great experience in manufacturing touchscreen phones (Prada, Viewty), so they could make the first phone-PDA on the world, that is only as large as a usual cell phone, but it still doesn’t restrict the user.

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The sample device came in the usual demanding package, characteristic for the manufacturer. Besides the phone we can find a micoUSB cable, a charger, a stereo headset (composed of two parts) and a high class leather case in the box. This latter one is something similar like Samsung P310’s, it just doesn’t have a battery inside. It’s front, however, can be opened, so we can access the device, that is held firmly by the plastic holders, and we can even take pictures, as there is a hole on the back for the camera.

Exterior

So KS20 is small. It’s very small. Its weight is only 92.5 grams, which is so unusual, that it even seems a bit “too light”, but hey, this is a really pleasant value. Its size is 58 x 99.8 x 12.8 mm, so although it has a bit different shape (it’s wider), but it still has a size similar to a conventional cell phone. The thing is that there has been no such Pocket PC before. Of course HTC Touch or E-TEN X600 aren’t big either, but KS20, using prime materials, and having a minimalistic design, is even smaller.

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What is very fortunate, however, is that we don’t have to pay the price of the small size, at least not on the display. The small machine has a 2.8” QVGA touchscreen, which might seem small for many of you, but its use is justified in the case of KS20: there just wouldn’t have been enough space for a larger one. There is no problem with its quality, and it can even be used easily with our fingers, as KS20’s front is completely plane. There are no buttons, we only have the call handling keys to use, between which we can see a silver colored joystick. This has some play, but basically it’s easy to use. In the spirit of minimalistic design, the status LED is hidden in the top right corner of the front cover, right near the secondary camera.

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The back is made of a plastic that has a pleasant grip and that heavily collects fingerprints. In the top left corner we can see the 2 megapixel autofocus camera, while on the bottom there is the LG logo. The lower is the battery itself, there is no separate cover for it.

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In the top left corner we can see the hook for fastening the neck- or wristband. Under it there is the microUSB connector (covered with a small lid), while below this we can find the volume control keys. I think that these are positioned a bit too low, it takes some time to get used to their use. In the bottommost part there is the silo for the telescopic stylus.

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On the bottom there is the pin for taking off the battery, while on the right there is the camera’s exposure button, a hotkey (that launches Internet Explorer by default), the microSD slot (that is also covered) and the power button. There is nothing on top.

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Hardware, speed

The phone runs Windows Mobile 6 Professional as an operating system. The CPU is a 400 MHz Qualcomm MSM7200; RAM has a size of 128 MB, while ROM is 256 MB large. Free user space available is 40 MB of RAM and 137 MB of ROM, which is more than enough.

The device I had for testing had ROM version v10b, which suggests a beta version. Still, the system was stable, but some strange things did happen after installing the test software. VsBenchmark, for example, didn’t even launch, and it even killed the whole system. As there is no reset button, I had to take out the battery and put it back again in order to bring the phone back to life. Pocket PC Mark had its problems too, as it started up only after a couple of tries; I didn’t ever spend so much time benchmarking a phone before. These lockups were interesting though, as all other programs I had installed ran without difficulties.

The results are not at all outstanding, but we can’t say that they are awful. HTC Touch Slide, which has the same CPU, had better scores in all tests, but meaningful differences were only at the file system and graphical tests. E-TEN X600, which has a Samsung CPU, had better scores, but we shouldn’t forget that X600 has only 64 MB RAM, which is more important than Pocket PC Mark results.

Menu, software

It’s very good that the manufacturer created a pleasant-looking and usable menu system, so those users that are not experts of Pocket PCs can also launch any kind of software they want. It is a big problem, however, that there is no task manager installed, so the X button doesn’t close running programs, it only minimizes them, which results in the memory filling up very quickly. Although it’s very easy to install a free application to resolve this situation (like WkTASK), but I think that it had been better to correct this flaw in the factory.

The menu system can be accessed through the large button in the lower left corner. The buttons near it take us to the dial screen, messaging and Internet Explorer. The Start menu has the usual design; nothing has been changed by LG.

The application with a black background loads immediately, which I was very happy about, as there are several seconds of wait at many other competitors’ devices (e.g. E-TEN). The menu’s structure can be familiar from touchscreen LG phones: there are four icons on the side; each one of them stands for a category. In the first we can find stuff related to phone calls and messaging, the second contains multimedia features. The Games on the bottom doesn’t launch anything for some reason, not even the default Bubble Breaker.

The third tab has office and internet software, which includes the Office family software, the notepad, the to-do list, the calculator, the alarm clock, Internet Explorer, MSN and the application called PSNote. This latter one is a notepad that has a handwriting recognition algorithm that immediately converts text written on the screen to normal text, and it does this in a very efficient manner. After that it only takes a couple of moments to send the written text in SMS or email. On the fourth tab of the menu system we can find everything that’s related to settings and options.

Besides the lack of the task manager, another flaw is that the manufacturer didn’t include any kind of custom virtual keyboard, so we only have the factory default ones. Those can only be used with the stylus, although KS20 would have had a great benefit form enabling text entry with fingers.

That’s all for extra software, so this is no strength of LG – fortunately the user can help this, as opposed to hardware and design flaws. We might call a unique feature that we can enable USB Mass Storage mode in the settings. Enabling it makes KS20 show the memory card’s content as an external drive when connected to the computer – Asus devices have had this feature since a long time ago.

Phone calls, data transfer

The GSM module in the phone is tri-banded (900/1800/1900 MHz). KS20 supports third generation networks too; we can even use 3.6 megabit HSDPA for data transfers. WiFi standards 802.11b/g are supported, along with stereo Bluetooth 2.0 (A2DP), so there are lots of data communication methods.

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I had no problems during phone calls, voice quality was okay, I only had to get used to the bit strange place of the volume control keys. The dial screen is the Windows default, just like Outlook, the phonebook and messaging application.

The phonebook’s size is determined only by the amount of internal memory, so practically we can store as many entries as we want. There are a lot of extra field types too, so there are no problems in this matter. The system includes an email client, which supports authenticated IMAP servers and file attachments, and it can also send multimedia messages.

Multimedia

The camera on the back of the phone has a resolution of 2 megapixels, it has autofocus, and its operation is helped in darkness by a flash, which can stay lit continuously during video recording, so it can even be used as a flashlight. The largest available resolution for pictures is 1600 x 1200, while in case of videos this is 320 x 240 pixels. Autofocus is rather fast, while the camera’s software has a whole lot of settings, like white balance, JPEG compression, effects, self timer, image sequencing and exposure correction (+/- 2.5 LV in 0.5 steps).

Pictures are of a mediocre quality. Unfortunately the dynamic range is quite small, the sky burns out on almost every picture. Traces of noise filtering can also be observed on the photos, which loose lots of details due to this. Macro mode, however, is of an excellent quality, we get sharp pictures even from a distance of a few centimeters, and we don’t have to turn on anything or tamper with some fine-tune settings for this.

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The phone has an FM radio; it’s no use writing too much about, it’s easy to use and that’s all. We can play back music using the limited Media Player. Sound quality varies when on loudspeaker; the frontal speaker has a high level of distortion at a high volume, but it sounds fine when setting a lower sound volume. The included headset has two parts; the lengthener that has a microphone, a volume control and a 3.5 mm jack, has to be plugged in KS20, so we can use any other kind of headset we want. This is not absolutely necessary, as the one shipped with the phone has pretty good sound quality, but it’s incredibly loud, so we should pay attention if we don’t want to hurt ourselves.

Battery, summary

The battery has a capacity of 1050 mAh, and we can say the usual things: with normal use it has an uptime of two days, while if we use it a lot, than it has to be charged daily.

Summary: it is a great achievement for LG to create the first Pocket PC that has the same size as a usual cell phone, but there’s no limit in usability. It looks cool, its assembly quality is great and what’s even more important: it’s smart and easy to use. The presence of the custom menu system is a great feature, even though it hurts that there is no custom virtual keyboard that can be handled with fingers. These problems, however, can be solved, so at last even those users can enjoy the benefits of Windows Mobile who were afraid of buying such a device because of its size. Even more, KS20 has a pretty good price; it costs about €370 EUR, which is not much for these features, and if we also add the small size we can say that it’s a bargain. Its camera is nothing special, it unfortunately has a microUSB connector, it doesn’t have much software on it, but for such a price it’s still:

LG KS20

Bocha

Translated by Szaszati

LG KS20 has been provided by XXL GSM. The device can be bought at:
Budapest VI. Jókai tér 6.
Budapest VI. Teréz körút 18.
On-line at www.xxlgsm.hu.

Specifications

LG KS20
	Technology	GSM/GPRS/EDGE 900/1800/1900 MHz + UMTS, HSDPA
	Operating system	Windows Mobile 6 Professional
	Size	58 x 99.8 x 12.8 mm
	Weight	92.5 grams
	CPU	400 MHz Qualcomm MSM7200
	ROM/RAM	256 / 128 MB (151 / 39 MB free to use)
	Kijelző	2.8” diagonal, 240 x 320 pixels resolution, 16 bit color depth touchscreen
	Expandability	microSD
	WiFi	802.11b/g
	Infra / Bluetooth	none / 2.0 (A2DP too)
	GPS receiver	none
	Audio	microUSB audio output (3.5 mm jack converter included), microphone, mono speaker
	Camera	2 megapixels, autofocus, flash
	Battery	1050 mAh changeable Li-Ion
	Other	FM radio