LG was founded in 1958 by the name of Goldstar and in November 1962 the first Goldstar telephone was launched in Korea followed by a refrigerator and a black and white television. In March 1968 the first overseas company was founded in New York. And the 13th of April 1978 Goldstar became the first company in electronics that reached an export figure of 100 million dollars. They changed their name from Goldstar to LG Electronics in March 1995. LG Electronics are currently market leader on the field of electronics in Korea and claim a considerable market share in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and England where they have been active for some years now. This year, in January 2007 to be precise, LG introduced the LG KE970 Shine. The slogan LG has brought into this world together with the LG Shine is: "Born to shine" which it certainly does! LG will undoubtedly try to make the LG Shine equally successful as the LG Chocolate or even to surpass the latter's success.
LG was founded in 1958 by the name of Goldstar and in November 1962 the first Goldstar telephone was launched in Korea followed by a refrigerator and a black and white television. In March 1968 the first overseas company was founded in New York. And the 13th of April 1978 Goldstar became the first company in electronics that reached an export figure of 100 million dollars. They changed their name from Goldstar to LG Electronics in March 1995. LG Electronics are currently market leader on the field of electronics in Korea and claim a considerable market share in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and England where they have been active for some years now. This year, in January 2007 to be precise, LG introduced the LG KE970 Shine. The slogan LG has brought into this world together with the LG Shine is: "Born to shine" which it certainly does! LG will undoubtedly try to make the LG Shine equally successful as the LG Chocolate or even to surpass the latter's success.
Design
The LG KE970 is not a big handset measuring 99.8 x 50.6 x 13.8 mm but its all metal construction accounts for the hefty weight of 119 g. Honestly, the handset doesn’t feel heavy at all and the added weight in fact adds for a feel of solidness that is rarely seen in modern mobile phones. Design wise, it’s hard to determine whether it might appeal more to men or women. Truth be told, that due to the mirror finish of the front panel, the most men that saw it commented that it’s probably a handset more suitable for women than for men. Our personal opinion is that the device has a unisex design that should find a wide fan base regardless of the sex.
The handset would certainly not win the slimmest phone prize but yet visually it leaves an impression of a really slim device. The only functional element in the upper part of the front panel is the integrated loudspeaker which is also used as an in-call speaker. Sliding the upper panel reveals the entirely even keypad. As it seems it’s made by a whole metal sheet with the individual keys cut into it.
The central design piece of the KE970 is without a doubt the navigation scroller and the soft keys. The scroller is not a new navigation solution in the mobile world but it hasn’t been used for quite some time now. There is more to the LG navigation than what the eye reveals. There are two more keys integrated into each side of the scroller but they are far from obvious. They don’t seem much like keys at all and you can easily miss their presence – we failed to spot them when we saw the LG Shine for the first time at the 3GSM Congress at Barcelona this year. These keys expand the capabilities of the scroller since they allow for side movement in the user interface. The other two soft keys which are positioned further away are contextual keys – they again are entirely made of metal.
After all is said and done however the LG scroller managed to disappoint us from the very beginning. Let’s just say that it doesn’t even closely resemble the regular PC mouse scroller. The scrolling navigation was not as responsive as you’d expect it to be – sometimes a scroll didn’t make any movement in the user interface, sometimes it did more than one. More than often it reacted slower that one would like. Generally, working your way through the menu system required a lot of movement from your thumb and when you add to that the stiffness of the navigation keys and the scroller itself when pressed – the LG Shine navigation provided for a really unpleasant, thumb-itching and tiring experience.
When extending the telephone in order to open it, the mirror-like surface of the monitor of the LG Shine changes. That needs getting used to when using the phone for the first time. In the beginning you don't see the menu but only the reflection of yourself. After a while you will see through that and it won't bother you anymore. Rendering on the screen is fine, very clear and the colours are bright. Unfortunately, in sunny weather it is almost impossible to see anything on the monitor. You will have to go through a lot of trouble to get some shade on the monitor to be able to see what you are doing.
Keypad
The numerical buttons of the LG Shine are hidden underneath the slide. Their size is fine and they feel great. Even those people among us with broader fingers won't encounter any problems operating them. Below the screen the true innovation of this apparatus is placed: the scroll dial. This multi-functional scroll dial makes operating the LG KE970 extremely easy and quick. When you turn the scroll dial up, the menu function goes up, when you turn it down, the menu function goes down. As you can see; a very intuitive and easy operation. During writing short text messages (using T9) you can even choose the words by turning the scroll dial, very clever!
Camera
Like most modern telephones of today; the LG Shine is also equipped with a digital auto focus camera. This camera offers 2 Megapixel and a Schneider-Kreuznach lens. If you want to use the camera, all you have to do is press the release button and the camera will be activated. In addition, the LG Shine features a small flash that you can turn on and off. In on mode, the flash will be on continuously. A pity LG didn't equip the LG Shine with an automatic flash because now you have to turn the flash on and off which makes you miss the photographic moment.
The camera suffers from shutter lag, which is not surprising. When pressing the release button completely down, it still takes a while before the camera actually makes the picture. Writing the picture onto the memory card of the camera also takes some time and that was rather annoying at times when I wanted to take pictures sequentially. Despite the flash the LG's camera encounters some problems taking pictures in bad light conditions. The effective range of such a small flash is obviously rather limited. And due to the fact that it takes a while before a picture is taken, they suffer from blur as a result of jitter in badly lit circumstances.
In general pictures taken by the digital camera of the LG KE970 Shine are fine, certainly when you take them outdoors in broad daylight. You can select various qualities and resolution settings. The lowest resolution is 320x240 and the highest is 1600x1200 pixels. Besides that you can choose from the following quality settings: normal, fine and superfine. Pictures made in the highest resolution and in good light circumstances are sharp and their colours are vivid. In larger rooms, badly lit, it is kind of hard to take pictures. Unfortunately they do suffer from digital noise. The white balance settings work well. When a picture turns out a bit yellowish or bluish, just adjust the white balance setting and the image will go back to its normal colour.
The digital camera of the LG Shine offers many setting possibilities. Besides the quality settings it offers the possibility of setting the self-timer, a macro function, exposure metering values, a multi-shot mode and adjusting colour settings. The multi-shot mode is very convenient when you want to capture subjects that move fast. This mode does not solve every problem, for example shutter lag, but it will enable you to at least catch your subject, if you press the shutter button on time. For colour effects, black/white, sepia, negative and normal are available.
MicroSD memory
You can enhance the LG Shine's memory capacity by using a microSD memory card. There is a choice from many cards with different capacities and speeds. We chose the SanDisk 2GB microSD memory card because of the stability and speed of the SanDisk memory cards. You could also choose to purchase the 2GB micro SD Memory Kit. Not only will this give you a microSD but also a miniSD and an SD card. There are various possibilities of transferring files from the microSD memory card to a computer. A good choice would be the SanDisk Mobile Mate SD + 5 in 1 card reader. It is a very small card reader and therefore easy to carry with you.
Phonebook
The phonebook of the LG KE970 Shine is better than the one of the LG KG800 Chocolate and is in fact the updated version that we saw implemented in LG KE800 Platinum. The contacts capacity is 1000 contacts which is more than enough. Search is performed through gradual typing of a name’s characters. The phonebook allows the storing of 4 numbers /mobile, home, office, fax/ and an email. Further on the contact can be included into a caller group or can be assigned a picture. You can add a note to the contact too. It’s good to see that the phonebook has received a facelift and now looks much more user friendly.
As we already mentioned any contact can be assigned a picture. The original KG800 was pretty much handicapped in that respect since it allowed only .bmp pictures to be used with 72 x 72 pixels size. The KE800 had that fixed and you were free to use any picture of your choosing. Now again there are strict limitations – in order to use the picture as a contact image it has to be a JPG file with a size of 640x480 pixels. As usual you can view the contacts along with their respective pictures. It’s a cool, but poses certain inconvenience since the picture hides some characters from the contacts names.
You can assign a ringtone to individual contacts as in KE800 Platinum. The only way to do that in the original LG KG800 Chocolate is by including the contact in a caller group and assigning a specific ringtone to the caller group itself. The phone has several preinstalled caller groups which can be customized. Each caller group has its icon and that can be shown in front of the respective members’ names in the contacts list in order to recognize easily which group they belong to. As with LG KE800 Platinum you can save a second or a third number to an already existing contact directly from the standby screen – something impossible in the original Chocolate.
Call management
Nothing special in the call records department. They are available as a separate item in the main menu and also can be accessed by pressing the call (receiver) key. In fact pressing the call key takes you to the general list of all dialed, received and missed calls. If you wish to see the separate registers you have to go to the abovementioned Call History menu item. The GPRS data counter is also available in the Call History menu.
Messaging
When you start a new message you are given the option of choosing among a text message, multimedia message, an email or Bluetooth message. The Bluetooth messaging is something new for LG mobiles. If you choose the text type further on you could easily change it by just attaching multimedia content to it and thus turn it into an EMS or MMS. As with KE800 Platinum the EMS functionality is not on the level of the original LG Chocolate for some unknown reason. There you could type with highlighted text, set the text alignment, etc. None of those features is available here.
The message typing is assisted by T9. A nice feature is that if you have started a new message and all of a sudden you have to cancel its typing, it’s saved automatically as a draft and next time you decide to start a new message the phone not only stores it for you but automatically opens it for you to continue.
Another nice feature is that the phone keeps a record of the last numbers you have sent messages to and when sending a new one you can choose among them instead of digging down in the full phonebook list. It’s a feature we would like to see in more phones nowadays.
The contacts capacity is 1000 contacts which is more than enough. Search is performed through gradual typing of a name’s characters. The phonebook allows the storing of 4 numbers /mobile, home, office, fax/ and an email.
The email client supports the POP3, IMAP4 and SMTP protocols and as regards sending and receiving text emails it successfully does it job as we managed to found out during the test period. As regards emails with file attachments it poses rather strict limitations. The maximum size for one sent or downloaded message is 300KB. In case you have received message with more than 5 attachments, only 5 of them will be received. For each email account you may save up to 50 messages (totally 150 for three accounts), while in the Inbox you can store up to 30 messages for each account. The other 20 slots are reserved for the Drafts and Outbox folders. A good thing is that there is an option to provide a separate username and password for the SMTP server.
Office and imaging
The LG KE970 has 50MB of integrated memory and a microSD memory card slot. The effectively available memory to the user in fact is around 48MB. The file manager appears as a My stuff item in the main menu. It includes separate factory preset folders for different multimedia content. In fact these folders are the only one you will see since the file manager doesn’t actually support user-created folders. You can create such folders using the computer and the USB cable of course, but they do not get listed in the My Stuff menu. You can mark, copy or move files only within the designated multimedia group. For example you cannot copy image files to the music folder. Then again you can of course copy or move files to the external memory or send them through Bluetooth connection and for all of those options you can rely on multiple marking.
File manager
A new folder as compared to the LG KE800 Platinum is the Documents folder. In fact it represents the office document viewer functionality of the KE970. It’s a rather innovative feature for a non-OS mobile phone and it’s certainly a first for LG GSM mobile phones. As we managed to confirm, the viewer supports MS Word documents, MS Excel files and PDF files.
Generally speaking, the file browser of the LG KE970 Shine provides basic functionality but offers some upgrades over previous versions. As with LG KE800 Platinum you no longer need to view picture files by opening and closing them one by one as it was with the original LG Chocolate phone. Contrary to the LG KE800 you can view pictures fullscreen and what is more you can even browse them in landscape mode. You can even see the pictures in their full size while making use of a nice browsing feature.
The thumbnail view browsing of the available pictures has received a speed boost and now it works much more natural . All of those are a real progress for the LG user interface and we haven’t seen them in previous models. It must be noted though that in this respect LG phones lag a lot behind Sony Ericsson phones.
Conclusion
The LG KE970 Shine is a mobile phone that will appeal not only to the trendy man or woman but also to the gadget freak. It has an easy operable MP3 player and operating the menu functions is just as quick and easy. Of course it can do with improvement on some points, for example an auto flash. It is very inconvenient having to turn on and off the flash every time you want to use it or stop using it. The monitor is excellent, although rather difficult to use in bright sunlight, which I more or less expected when I saw this phone for the first time. All in all LG have put a remarkable high quality telephone in the market, with solid exterior and a trendy appearance. The LG Shine is easy to operate which will be to the benefit of the novices among us who are just starting to use a mobile phone. In short the LG Shine is a real must!
