LG GC900-Display
The LG Viewty Smart has a 3.0″, 480 x 800 pixel display capable of displaying 16M colors. The display resolution is excellent and considering the size the image looks very crisp and sharp. The image quality too is excellent indoors with good colors and contrast. However, all hell breaks loose when you take the phone outside, as the visibility drops down to zero under the sun. Now this is something that we also noted on previous LG phones and I hope LG gets its act together and improves in this area, as it makes the phone pretty much useless outdoors.
The Viewty Smart uses a capacitive touchscreen technology, which means the touch response will be better than resistive displays. I found the display response to be excellent and better than what it was on the LG Arena.
I noticed that there was a rather large gap on the left side of the display from where the backlight was leaking. Also, considering the fact that there is enough free space left around the display, LG could have put in a bigger display instead of just letting all that space go waste.
UI & Navigation
The LG Viewty Smart uses LGs new S-Class interface that we first saw on the Arena. The interface improves heavily on the previous Flash UI on the original Viewty and is much easy to use, not to mention more attractive. The phone uses hardware graphic acceleration to achieve smoother UI animations and transitions and I am glad to say it works pretty well.
The UI design is basically the same as the Arena. The phone has four home screens: the shortcut screen, where you can have nine shortcut icons for four of your favourite functions on the screen; the Widget screen, where you can select from the few available widgets available and place them on screen to quickly access certain functions; the Contact screen, where you can place your favourite contacts on screen (limited up to 20 contacts) to instantly call or message them; and the Multimedia screen, where you can place your 20 favourite tracks and 20 images on the screen for quick access.
You can select any one of these screens as the default screen that or you can scroll through them by flicking your finger horizontally or just press the button on the left, which makes the four screens appear as a cube and you can quickly jump to your favourite screen.
All the four screens have a standard set of icons at the bottom, contacts, messages, dialler and main menu. The main menu has four rows of eight icons each. Each row shows only four icons in portrait mode (and all eight in landscape mode) and the rest can be accessed by scrolling horizontally within that row. You can press and hold an icon to change the icon location within that row.
The UI supports kinetic scrolling and it works pretty smoothly. However, the list doesn’t go as far as you would like it to when you scroll it, and hence in a long list you have to scroll several times to reach the point where you have to go. There also appears a scroll bar while scrolling but it is not very smooth and it is difficult sometimes to stop at exactly the place where you want.
The phone has a built-in accelerometer for auto rotation of the UI. It however only works in selected places such as the main menu and in certain apps such as the browser or the media player. Unfortunately, the accelerometer sensitivity is not set correctly and sometimes it rotates the UI unnecessarily and at other times not at all when you want it to. For example in camera mode when holding the phone horizontally the phone keeps switching the UI to portrait mode even though the phone is horizontal and needs constant correction to keep in landscape mode. Often pictures taken in landscape mode get saved in portrait mode.
There are some other minor annoyances as well. For example when you go back one level from a setting, instead of being at the same place where you entered the phone, it goes to the top of the setting list again. This same behaviour was found in the music player as well. If you enter an album and then decide to go back, the phone then takes you again to the top of the list and you’ll have to scroll down again to the album which you selected if you need to check the next one in the list. I wonder how difficult it is to remember the position in the list after clicking on an item.
Overall UI experience is good and it has been slightly improved from the one on the Arena. However, it is still not as good as the one on the iPhone.
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· Tags: LG GC900
