The wireless connectivity of the Viewty handset is represented with the Bluetooth unit. In addition to the standard settings of visibility status, a simplified on/off BT switch was added - a click on the icon switches BT on if it was off before and vice versa. The Bluetooth version is slightly outdated, it remains unclear why LG decided not to upgrade it while the absolute majority of modern handsets support the latest version of Bluetooth.

The Flight Mode is now an independent menu item (which would look much better placed into the Profiles menu). Upon activation it switches off the GSM unit, which is a must in places like airplanes and hospotals. The common practical use of this feature, as you have already guessed, is to save the battery charge. Going in Flight Mode gives the phone about extra 10% of battery life.

After the first boot or changing the USIM card, the phone prompts a window asking to specify the date and time, also providing a basic instruction on using some of its features. This prompted mode only works on the first boot, if you exit the auto setting wizard you will further face the necessity of manually configuring all the features.

In the sleep mode, no information is displayed on the screen, but pressing any of the buttons will bring up the current time and date indication for a few seconds. The standby mode features four icons providing access to basic functions such as main menu, dial menu, messages menu and the contact book.

The upper part of the screen traditionally stores status information and serves as a base for the following icons: the multitasking mode, the battery charge meter, the current profile indicator (clicking it will bring up the full list), the alarm clock status (if it's configured), background mode, player, Bluetooth status (the icon changes accordingly) and the signal level. If the mp3 player is running in the background, a crawling line with the song info is displayed right under the status bar. A four-point scale is displayed during recharging, indicating the current battery charge, e.g. to filled points stand for a 50% charge, etc.

The multitasking mode is new to LG phones, but has a long lasting history among Sony Ericsson and Nokia products. Any application can be minimized without terminating the process, save for Java midlets, which can't be run in numbers exceeding one simultaneously. For example, you can launch the camera while listening to a song - the song pauses and holds on as long as the camera as active, then continues playing from the track position where the pause occured.

Upon accessing the main menu, the user enters a tab carrying out the primary functions: it gives access to the dial menu, contact book, call log and messaging system. The second tab includes My Folders, Camera, Film Studio, Music, Video, Voice Recorder, Radio and Games & Applications. The third tab mainly considers PIM functionality, web browsing and carrier options. The last tab contains miscellaneous settings and Bluetooth options. The interface is simply yet effectively designed, easily understandable even by the less experienced users.

The second item in the main menu is the Contacts book. Here you can search for a contact, create a new one, specify the quick dial settings, edit contact groups, view the general phone info including a field containing your own number, memory status and the business card info, as well as the general contact settings.

In the settings, it's possible to make the contact book display phone memory and/or USIM card stored contacts separately, which hasn't been previously seen in LG phones. The contacts can be synchronized with an Exchange server, copied to the USIM card and vice versa, backed up and recovered from a backup. A backup copy is created in the .vcf file format and stores the time and date stamp of its creation, which can be easily viewed on the PC.

The 1 key serves to activate the voice mail, while the resting 8 buttons can be set to act as quick dial keys with assigned contact numbers.

This LG model offers the maximum number of contact record fields:

Phone types:

- Home;
- Mobile;
- Work;
- Pager;
- Fax;CX
- VT;
- Common.

A total of five number types can be specified, two different e-mail addresses, three user group affiliations, a unique call picture selectable from the camera photo stock, image gallery or a collection of avatar icons, a unique ringtone and a home page address.

The contact's personal information:

- Адрес – 50 symbols;
- ZiP Code – 20 symbols;
- Town – 50 symbols;
- Region – 50 symbols;
- Country – 20 symbols.

- Company name – 30 symbols;
- Work Position – 32 символа;
- Address
- Reminder (up to 62 symbols)

The Left and Right buttons serve to browse through the contacts without quitting to the root menu.

The USIM menu.

LG phones have long been known for a decent approach to the graphics side, but the subtle feeling of something missing was always around. With Viewty, the feeling is gone. Quite an opposite question pops up - how come they introduced such a lot of settings? In addition to the standard options allowing to configure the ringtones and vibro signals, a possibility to select any audio file available from the memory for a ringtone was added. Besides the sound settings, the phone has a setting governing the screen response to the touch. For example, the phone can response to the touch with a customizable signal (sound / vibration). The signal sound is selectable from the three preset samples, the volume of the signal is adjustable in the same menu on a seven-point scale. The vibro signal type is also selectable from three preset options, and the power of vibration is likewise set on a seven-point scale. The power on and off audio sequences can also be customized with a user-selected file or even switched off.

In addition to the five standard profiles, up to 2 user profiles may specified, fully customizable to the user's liking.

The Call Settings is a standard meny type found with all phones. Here the call redirect, call block, quick dial, blacklist and similar settings are stored. The black list and Bluetooth response modes are the only items from this list which deserve a detailed description; the rest of features hardly require any specific descriptions, being perfectly self-explaining.

Viewty is the first LG handset to have a blacklisting feature. It's possible to add either a single number or up to three user groups to the ignore list, also blacklisting supports concealed or unregistered numbers. Unfortunately, our test sample wouldn't display the contact book to pick a number after selecting the black list, so it was required to specify the number manually, which is quite uncofortable since the access to the contacts is blocked. Any incoming call from a blacklisted number is dropped, accompanied with a standard 'declined' screen message.

The Messages Menu contains a number of items, some of them traditional and some quite new to LG products, for instance the Smilies menu comprising eight preinstalled smilies and an option to add custom ones. The messaging settings include SMS, MMS, E-mail and V-mail (videomail), which is quite natural for a 3G supporting phone and a powerful CPU allowing for watching videos with maximum comfort. The maximum number of messages can't exceed 300. You can neither archive them nor move to the flash card.

The rest of settings are quite ordinary, save for the fact that the phone has no ready presets for the most popular mail systems like Gmail, which is a bit disappointing. The MMS settings offer a number of profiles depending on the SIM card you're using, for example a local carrier in Kiev offers services like Kyivstar, Ace&Base and Djuice.

On starting a message it's automatically recognized as a regular SMS, but once an attachment is made, it is automatically converted into MMS. If the message length exceeds 160 letter, the phone will prompt an MMS conversion. The maximum byte size for an outgoing message mustn't exceed 300 Kb. Up to 20 recipients can be specified for a single message. Many of our visitors want to know how easy typing goes with this handset. A total of four ways for text input are provided:

- regular keyboard - a regular 12-button panel where you have to press the same button for a fixed number of times to get the letter you need
- fullsize QWERTY keyboard - the display switches aspect to landscape mode and shows a virtual QWERTY keyboard
- handwriting input - the lower part of the screen is divided in two, each serving for entering separate symbols
- alternative handwriting input - the whole screen is used for inscribing letters; this is the second quickest way of text input yielding only to T9. The user can enter whole words with a single movement of the hand, the small pauses between are used by the phone to perform the text recognition.

If you press the Drop Call button accidentally, the message is automatically saved in the Drafts folder.

The absolute majority of people involved with the mobile technology tended to complain about the bleak implementation of the Calendar feature in this company's phones. It took quite a while for LG to realize that and enrich the variety of options offered by the local PIM. In Viewty, the PIM functionality is maximized, closely approaching the level of largest rival companies.

The calendar settings allow for a viewmode to be set - weekly or monthly, the week can either be set to start with Sunday or Monday. To out great surprise, the user is no longer given the liberty of customizing the message signal. On the other hand, any of the calendar events can be sent to another person over SMS, MMS or E-mail, or even via Bluetooth. Handling the events associated with a particular date can be simplified by using the selection, which can encompass a few event records picked for deletion. All calendar and reminder info can be backed up to the onboard memory or to the flash storage. The same menu provides the option to recovery functions.

A meeting can be supplied with a begin and end time, add a description (138 symbols), the place and the signal set-off time: fixed, 15, 30 or 60 minutes before, or 1, 3 or 7 days before. The signal repeat status can be set either to once or to daily, weekly, monthly or yearly. An expiration date can also be specified.

The Anniversary offers similar possibilities with Meetings. The only difference is the event icon.

Unlike the two previous event types, the Birthday only contains such fields as begin and end time, description, the reminder signal activation time and the repeat status - once or yearly, as well as an expiration date.

The tasks and reminders have few settings, only allowing to specify a date, a description (256 symbols) and a priority level. The maximum number of calendar records and reminders is limited to 100 for either category.

Surpisingly enough, the phone comes with 130 Mb of onboard memory and the maximum number of notes is limited to five only, each one mustn't exceed 1000 symbols. First we thought this limitation was mistakenly introduced into our test samples, but our Western European colleagues say that the same limitation was discovered in their samples as well.

Most LG phones tend to have up to five independent alarm clocks. But some of the recent models reduced this number to one. Unlike these, Viewty sticks to the old tradition, offering up to five alarm clocks which can be configurated independently. The biggest plus in comparison to the other models is that any type of audio file can serve as the alarm signal. The bad side is that you can't set the alarm clock to set off on specific days, rather being limited to choose from a number of presets like: once, daily, workdays, wordays + Saturday, weekend, holidays only. The interval at which the alarms will be repeated is specified manually, ranging from 5 minutes to 1 hour, or can simply be switched off.

Depending on the type of signal chosen - once or repeated, the phone will show one or several icons next to the event label.

The mp3 player stands among this models' significant yet not primary points. This is the first LG model to feature playlists and content filtering by several categories including track name, genre, performer and other parameters.

The exterior looks of the player are rather simple, yet the player itself is highly functional. The upper part of the screen shows some status information, the lower displays buttons acting as Close, Mute and Menu respectively. The player menu comprises five items: minimize, that is set the player to work in background, Visualization Options, File info - the same as the "i" icon, Send (MMS, E-mail Bluetooth are available). Besides the menu, the player has Pause, Forward and Back buttons, a sound volume meter, Repeat, Play All and Random buttons. To view the playlist, one should press the button in the upper right corner.

The player is only launchable from the main menu. The Music folder provides access to the audio settings and playlists. The menu items are: Recent Tracks, All Tracks, Playlists, Performers, Albums, Genres and Random Playback, everything quite self-explaining. We never experienced any problems or lags over the two months of testing. The right upper corner has a hand magnifier icon which brings up the search menu where you can look up a track by entering the initial letters of the song name. Simply by typing B you get all tracks starting with B, Be will filter the results to tracks starting with Be and so on, until you find what you were looking for.

The audio quality is quite good, provided that you buy a decent headset; the 3.5 mm universal jack helps a lot in this cause. In addition to the bundled headset we also tested a Bluetooth headset Sony Ericsson DS980 and a wire headset Koss Plug. At maximum volume the sound was loud enough to blast away ears.

Ironically, the model lacks any equalizer customization due to a surprising lack of equalizer itself. You can't switch the audio to a more profound or higher-pitched sounding, which may turn quite dissappointing to some people. An incoming call automatically pauses the playback and continues it automatically once the talk is over.

Despite the announced DivX support for videos played at 640x480, we had a hard time picking a clip that would play on the phone without problems. Most DivX clips produced a 'unsupported output format' error message on opening. Finally we were able to play an AVI file at 704x392 lasting 5 minutes. The Windows Media Player (.wmv) files aren't supported despite of the official site announcing full support for this format. The same site states the models' ability to read .txt files, however in real life that's not true.

It seems that you have to convert any movie to a phone compatible format before watching it on the phone; AVI files are played at resolutions exceeding 640x480, which isn't true for MP4: the phone refused playing a 640x480 MP4 clip though handled 480x272 clips with ease. The interface of the video player is very similar to that of the audio player, so the designers could have combined both in a single application - just like in Series40 5th Revision platform.

Once the player is launched, a status line is displayed at the top line of the screen, showing indicators like the signal strength, battery charge and multitasking. The three traditional buttons reside at the bottom of the screen, functioning as Close, Mute and Menu respectively. Depending on the type of the currently selected file, the menu contains a different number of items. For instance, an AVI file with a resolution above 640x480 would have: File Info, Send (MMS, E-mail, Bluetooth, YouTube) and TV-OUT. Generic 3G and AVI files have the following options: set as an incoming call ringtone and open in video editor. Besides the status lines, the player interface features the Close, Repeated Playback and Play All buttons, volume controls, Pause button, Forward and Back rewinding buttons. The playbar is fully interactive, the scrollbox can be moved around with a touch of the stylus or finger.

The playlist icon is found in the upper right corner; activating it will bring up the playlist, the currently played file indicated with a selection bar. A single tap on the screen engages the fullscreen mode. After that, the video continues playing in a landscape aspect. In this mode, the volume meter is shown on the right side of the screen, and the track listing buttons are shown at the bottom, as well as buttons allowing to revert the screen back to the portrait mode, rewind the clip back and forth or pause it.

In the fullscreen mode, the icons are rendered in a semi-transparent state and than fade away in three seconds. An incoming call stops the playback, after the talk is over you can continue it from the moment where the it stopped. Rewinding is progressive, starting at a rate of five seconds per step and gradually accelerating as you keep the button pressed.

The Film Studio is a rather unimportant yet nice addition. This editor gives the user more fun than practical benefit. By combining a number of pictures in a sequence and adding a background music, you get a slide show similar to one produced with the help of a Nokia smartphone, saved in the MP4 format. Depending on the number of frames, the file size ranges between one and several Mbytes. If the corresponding option is activated, the movie will be resized to fit the maximum size of an MMS attachment. It's possible to add a number of audio effects.

The Video Editor is a by far more powerful tool. Regardless of the format and resolution of the video, the output format for the Editor is MP4, 320x240; the video streams are effectively compressed without any visible loss of quality, saving significant amounts of storage space. The editor supports the following features:

- Cut – saves a selected fragment of the video
- Join - glues together two video clips (even regardless of different file formats), the joining point can be imbued with one of the available video effects: fade-out, scaling, oval, opening, diafragm, chessboard or flow-in;
- Add an image - adds a JPG picture to the end of a clip with the same optional effects;
- Add text - adds a text overlay (of 15 letters maximum), the screen is split into nine sectors; the user chooses the one where the text overlay should be applied; the starting frame in which the overlay pops up is selected manually
- Add image – adds an image overlay, the screen is split into nine sectors; the user chooses the one where the image overlay should be applied; the starting frame in which the overlay pops up is selected manually
- Voice Record - adds a custom voice overlay to a clip's existing soundtrack, however the resulting audio quality is rather low
- Mixing - adding an mp3 overlay to a clip's existing soundtrack
- Timescale - it's possible to accelerate (х2, х4) or slow down (х1/2, х1/4) the original video, at the price of rendering the record completely mute
- Fade-out - the screen fades out during the final frames of a video.

Talking in advance we'd like to note out than in addition to the standard set of possibilities present in various video editing applications found on many phones, the exclusive feature of Viewty is the possibility to write text or paint with the stylus.

The image editor includes the following functions:

- Cut - allows to select a square or oval area for cutting and applying further effects
- Pencil - is analogous to the brush tool in the conventional PC image editors; the brush thickness is selectable from four available sizes
- Text - adds a text overlay to the image; three message types are available - standard, square-framed and oval-framed. The font color and screen position are customizable.
- Stamp – adds a stamp selectable from a variety of available variants at a particular location in the picture where you touch the screen. The number and color of the stamps is up to your decision.
- Eraser - counteracts the Pencil tool, offering four brush sizes, eliminating any traces of a previously applied effect in the affected area;
- Effects - applies one of the available effects to the whole image or a selected area: sharpen/blur, mosaic, frame (9 variants), resize (352х288, 320х240, 176х144, 400х240 or 152х160), color schemes (black and white, sepia, color negative, saturate/desaturate red/green/blue, change contrast)
- Miscellaneous - morphing (transparent smilies), color select (similar to the wand tool in Photoshop), change color (color select + color replace), rotate (90, 180 or 270 degrees) and mirror image.

All of these features are available with the majority of other phones, let alone personal computers, but only with LG you get a handset that enables the use of stylus in the image editor.

Ironically, Viewty is among the very models which don't support phone talk recording with the voice recorder application. The voice recorder can only be launched from the menu; at that, if you try to take advantage of multitasking, you'll be warned that you should interrupt the talk prior to launching the voice recorder.

The voice recorder settings allow to set the maximum record length - to fit the MMS attachment size limit, a minute or unlimited, the record quality - average, good or fine. There's no option to choose between WAV and AMR. By default, the record is saved to the onboard memory, you can move it to the flash card only after the record is finished.

A saved record can be sent with a message, over e-mail, Bluetooth or set as the default ringtone. The record quality is on an average level, almost unaffected by the available quality settings. A pop song recorded from a distance of three meters makes a rather poor record.

Most consumers tend to think that a multimedia phone ought to be equipped with a FM unit. There might be something to it, considering that a multimedia phone is meant to provide maximum possible entertainment; in real life things often deviate from the ideal - we could recall a number of multimedia-oriented models which don't have this seemingly simple feature.

The FM tuner provides a good quality of signal, though no RDS support is included and the number of favorites is limited to 12, however the latter limitation is easily bypassed by browsing the recently listened stations list.

There's no possibility for radio signal recording, this feature never made it into the final version of the device, though a number of early pre-sale samples had this functionality, supporting FM-to-phone audio recording in several formats and a scheduled recording option which let the phone start recording automatically at a preset time. The FM tuner window can run in the background mode in a minimized state.

The phone's content storage system is divided into eight folders, one of these being a shortcut to acess the exterior storage (memory card), which features the same selectable storage locations as in the onboard memory, save for the missing Flash directory.

The user can move or copy files between directories, but only within the limits of the themed folder. E.g. you can't move a picture to the Video folder. In addition to the regular copy and move actions performed with the menu buttons, you can just drag and drop the file icons, which works just fine. That's by far more comfortable that the regular button way, but unfortunately doesn't affect directories themselves. Using the menu buttons, you can create, rename or delete directories inside each folder. At the top of the screen, near the directory name, the overall file count of all content stored within, including subfolders, is displayed. The Video and Image folders support alternative viewmodes: the list mode brings 5 horizontal lines to the screen, each showing a thumbnail, while the grid mode displays 12 smaller thumbnails arranged in a gridlike fashion. Below each filename, an 'i' symbol and a storage location icon are displayed. The former brings up the file properties tab if activated, the latter indicates whether the file is stored in the onboard memory or on the flash card.

A directory name can't exceed the 47 symbol limit. Any file can be renamed, the filename limit is set to 58 symbols. A file can be attached to a message (mustn't exceed 300 Kb), an e-mail message, sent over Bluetooth or uploaded to a blog (an image) or YouTube account (video). Sorting can be done by file type, creation date and name. Unlike the previous handsets by LG, this model supports selecting a group of files for further copying, moving or sending via Bluetooth at once. A file can also be deleted by pressing the C button while selected.

It's noteworthy that you can select a number of filename checkboxes with a single slide of the finger, then apply an action to the whole selected group. The audio files have a peculiarity - these can't be drag-and-dropped. In addition to the standard file extensions, the phone allows viewing MS Office documents and SWF flash flicks.

It takes about two seconds for a 350 Kb XLS table containing a few tabs and pictures to load up. The document can be scaled from 100 to 300 per cent with a pace of 10 per cent. Scaling can be done by either pressing the corresponding screen buttons or by using the roller button. If a document is zoomed, a small thumbnail is shown in the bottom right corner. Documents can be viewed in portrait and landscape orientation alike. No editing options for Office documents are included.

SWF file handling is rather a simple feature. The files can be viewed in full screen, rewinding back and forth is supported, the movie can be paused or sent as an attachment over MMS, E-mail or Bluetooth if the file size doesn't exceed 100 Kb.

The Java performance and implementation have never been among the strong sides of LG devices. Originally the midlets could only be installed over WAP or the firmware application supplied with the software CD; later a possibility to install midlets from the memory card was introduced, however the Java performance rate was never improved which was a big source of disappointment for the mobile gamers, let alone the total lack of support for 3D graphics.

Finally LG set out to eliminate the bad image of their products on the front of Java functionality. Now it's possible to install Java midlets from the Web, via Bluetooth or from the flash storage.

In addition to the variety of ways to install Java midlets, you can move them to any folder or to the flash storage, which won't affect their functionality.

As seen from the test results, the Java performance of Viewty on the one hand is the highest among all the handsets by LG, and on the other hand is lagging behind such monsters as Nokia N95 or Sony Ericsson K850; still, that's enough to deal with 2D and 3D graphics in a comfortable manner.

Java multitasking isn't supported, the maximum jar size is limited to 1 Mb.

We weren't able to look up the exact name of the browser used in the phone; however it's perfectly clear that it has seen a good deal of programmers' attention and now stands among the best mobile browsers available out there. It features a set of functions very similar to that of Opera Mini, save for a few very minor differences in implementation. For instance, you can't change the font size but you can scale the pages in real time by using the scroller on the back surface, sitting next to the camera lens. The scale ranges from 25% to 175%, which is more than enough in any imaginable situation. At 75%, which is enough for most people to read everything from the screen without overstraining their eyes, the screen can contain from 19 to 27 lines of text, the latter number corresponding to the fullscreen mode. Scaling is performed almost instantly, provided that the page isn't overloaded with images.

The pages can be viewed in portrait and landscape mode alike, the screen icons can optionally be hidden during the viewing to provide more space. To view the whole page, you should press the hand magnifier icon, then you can proceed to the required part of it. Besides the comfortable navigation, the browser supports several window tabs simultaneously, a function relatively new to mobile web surfing. Without quitting the browser, you can send an URL over e-mail or SMS, view the history or save the page. The address line memory automatically prompts several previously visited URLs depending on the initial letters of the URL being typed.

The visualization settings allow to choose the initial appearance of the page: real size, resized to fit the screen, text only, navigable mini-map for the larger pages, page thumbnail on/off.

Another peculiarity is that the browser records site descriptions in the history log, showing them instead of the regular site address; a small icon next to the History label allows to switch this viewmode back to the full web addresses. During web surfing, you can block the keyboard with a single tap of the finger, however in this case the screen doesn't fade off.

One thing that's absolutely clear is that few users will ever need a third-party browser, save for a situation where one would have to minimize the traffic to the limit, but the actual difference is so negligible that it would require a thorough testing to see if the third-party alternative can ever be of help in such cases.

Traditionally, the Tools menu item contains the calculator, world clock and measure converter. The calculator can handle the math basics along with the more advance funcitons like cos, sin, tan, ln and so on.

The World Clock function has nothing special about it save for some nice visuals. Here you can select the current time zone and add up to six cities with corresponding time labels. The measure converter does the job for currency values, measures of area, length, weight, temperature, volume and speed.

The Settings menu item contains the majority of phone-specific settings like time, date, clock synchronization and/or auto update from the carrier's data center as well as power saving features.

The power saving mode can be set from daytime only to 24/7, which permanently sets the screen backlight level to 0%.

In addition to English, Russian, Ukrainian and three Baltic languages are available.

The Security tab allows to set, change or switch off PIN checks, enable or disable handset blocking after going idle (when the screen fades away), after changing the SIM card and so on.

Keyboard blocking (better say touchscreen blocking) can occur after a user-set period of time between 10 and 60 seconds, or turned off.

The Connections menu item contains all possible settings for different kind of connections from Web to TV-out. The preferrable mobile network type is selectable from UMTS and GSM, the handset can be set to work either as a modem or removable storage unit during phone-to-PC connections, Microsoft Exchange server and streaming video settings are also available from here. The memory status check can be done by activating the Memory Manager menu item, indicating the amount of free and used memory. The onboard memory is divided into a 90 Mb part for multimedia files and a 10 Mb part for messages and PIM recods. The storage type used for files incoming via Bluetooth can be selected from the same menu.

The last menu item contains information about the model and software version, in our case these were KU990_V10a plus the serial number.

This totally new section now integrated into newer LG models is dedicated to the viewing of recorded photo- and video materials. Once activated, you see a total of eight thumbnails indicating the file type - photo or video. The scrollbar at the top of the screen allows browsing the pages, the same function is carried out by the bottom-positioned left and right buttons. Similar to operations with other types of files, a photo or a video is opened by double clicking it. After the first click the icon is zoomed, and the bottom line displays the timestamp. In addition to the normal viewmode, there's a random order viewing feature, which only consists in the thumbnails being arranged randomly on the screen. Similar to browsing the content through the phone menu, you can activate the content editing function anytime.