LG GC900 Viewty Smart preview: First look

LG GC900 Viewty Smart 360-degree spin

The LG GC900 Viewty Smart has a pleasant design with an almost all black front and a silvery brushed metal back. The back panels are in fact plastic but they have the stylish faux brushed metal finish that's so trendy these days.

A version with an all-silvery design will also be available, but the one we got (and the one that's probably going to be available to Orange) has the black/silver combo.

The usual suspects

The Viewty 2 measures 108.9 x 56.1 x 12.4 mm, which makes it almost a millimeter larger in all directions than the LG Arena. The Viewty Smart, of course, has a higher-res camera, but has lost the 3.5mm standard audio jack and the FM transmitter. Perhaps a 3.5mm adapter will be available on the headset supplied with the retail package.

The heritage of the now elderly LG KU990 Viewty doesn't seem as obvious on the comparative shots. You can hardly tell that the elegant Viewty Smart is the successor of the thick and boxy Viewty 1.

LG GC900 Viewty compared to the original LG KU990 Viewty

We couldn't help but snap a few comparative shots of the Viewty Smart with some other, more recent full touch handsets. Almost all of them are either larger or thicker when compared to it.

LG Viewty Smart compared to LG Renoir, Apple iPhone 3G and Omnia HD

Design and construction

The LG GC900 Viewty Smart front panel is all about the 3" 16M color capacitive touchscreen display. Even though it uses the TFT technology as opposed to the AMOLED one on latest Samsung handsets it still provides excellent picture quality. The brightness and contrast levels are top-notch, comparable to the best examples in the class. Sunlight legibility however again suffers from the mirror-like finish as on a number of other LG phones.

The front panel is dominated by the large 3" capacitive touchscreen display

At the top of the Viewty Smart front panel is earpiece, the video call camera and the ambient light sensor used for automatically controlling the screen brightness.

Unfortunately, the regular receiver keys at the bottom are gone in favor of a large Back key that goes from side to side. It's actually only the central part of the button strip that can be pressed and it hardly provides an adequate press feedback. But we should remember that's a pre-production unit we are talking about here.

The large Back key at the bottom is symmetrically recreated at the top as well

The right side of LG Viewty 2 features the LG proprietary connectivity hidden under a protective cap. The port is used for connecting a charger, a USB cable, headphones or a TV-out cable.

As we already mentioned, the Viewty Smart lacks the 3.5 mm audio jack that the LG Arena has, so the connectivity port here is where the headset plugs in.

The right-hand side also hosts the volume rocker and the camera shutter key. For some unexplainable reason, the camera key launches the camera only if you have the phone on the standby screen. Pressing it while you are digging through the menus, won't do a thing.

The right side accommodates the USB port, the volume rocker and the camera key

On the left-hand side of the Viewty Smart are the microSD card slot (cards up to 16GB) and the Cube launcher key. The Cube is a spectacular 3D element of the S-class user interface that represents the four available homescreens as four sides of a on-screen 3D Cube.

The microSD card slot and the Cube launcher key at the left side

The bottom part of the LG Viewty Smart is perfectly plain, featuring no controls whatsoever, but the top hosts the On/Off key, which quite comfortably now also doubles as a lock key for the screen.

Bottom side is pretty bare • the On/Off key is also used to toggle the device in and out of Standby mode

The back side of the LG GC900 Viewty Smart hosts the 8 megapixel camera and its Power LED flash. The lens doesn't have any protection at all but is sufficiently lower than the surrounding surface so that it doesn't get scratched when you put the phone on a flat surface.

As we already pointed out, the back of the Viewty Smart looks quite the part with its brushed metallic finish, however in reality it's all plastic.

The LG GC900 Viewty Smart back panel is all plastic despite the deceptive metallic look