LG KE800 Platinum review: Chocolate sequel

The camera sounded exciting

Right off the start we are excited to test the 2 megapixel camera with autofocus. It turned out that the camera itself is not that better than the one in the original Chocolate. The only differences would be the maximum resolution of 1600x1200 pixels and the dubious benefit of the so called auto focus.

The truth is that the auto focus was not that good at its job and often missed the intended subjects. The camera application itself is rather slow and it takes around 10 seconds to take a picture at the maximum resolution and save it. 4 of those precious seconds go for the auto focus to accommodate to your subject. Well all that means is that you should forget about capturing images of fast moving subjects. The autofocus only really shined in Macro mode which proved great for taking pictures of text. We hope that the autofocus issues would be fixed in the final version. There is a LED flash which is there to help you in poor light conditions. Speaking of poor light conditions, the camera has a night mode which does it job very well and compared to night modes in similar cameras produces relatively low photo noise.

Camera viewfinder in portrait and landscape • Using the LED flash

It also offers 4x digital zoom which is not available at the maximum resolution though but this is not that great of a loss since it produces a mere crop & resize of the original image. The camera menu offers option such as picture resolution, brightness level, the white balance that has several presets according to the available light conditions, and some color effects such as sepia, black & white, negative, etc. Beside the regular Single shot mode the camera can also capture images in Multi shoot mode. At least there is one upgrade over the original camera software seen in KG800 - you can setup several options without having to enter the setup menu individually for each one.

Various camera settings

Otherwise the picture quality is fine if you managed to hold the phone perfectly still during image capturing. As we already said, the camera is awfully slow. There is a delay between the press of the button and the actual capturing of the photo. That means that most of the time the composition you want to take a shot at has already changed when the actual photographing takes place. Generally, you are could be easily misled by the long time it takes the camera to make the picture and deciding that it should have already taken the picture you could move a bit. That way you would turn the picture into an unrecognizable blur. But after all is said and done, there is no place for comparison between the quality produced by that camera and the one of cameraphones with auto-focus such as Sony Ericsson K750 and company.

An interesting thing is that the camera view finder, similar to that of Samsung D600 we should add, doesn't display the full picture that the camera actually takes. In a way the viewfinder somewhat zooms the image and the left and right sides of the picture are cut outside the viewable area. You can't even see the whole picture after you take it and save it. It's only after you download the photos on your PC that you would actually see what's hidden in those invisible borders.

Generally speaking the camera is not very user friendly and its usability suffers from the shutter lag and the cropped image view finder.

LG KE800 - samples in full resolution

Photos downsampled to 800x600 resolution

The camera also captures video in maximum resolution of 176 x 144 pixels and the output format is the usual .3gp. The menu of the video camera is pretty much the same as the one we already described for the still camera with few exceptions. It offers both limited and unlimited recording.

LG KE800 video sample

Great connectivity

The phone features full USB support and the LG USB cable comes along in the retail box along with the phone itself. The great thing about the USB support of the phone is that when connected it appears in the Windows explorer as a removable drive just as your regular USB flash drive would and no drivers are needed. If you receive a call whilst in mass storage mode, the call will be rejected but after you disconnect the handset, you will see the information about any missed calls.

Standby display while in USB drive mode

If you need any other type of synchronization between the phone and the PC like for items such as the phonebook and the schedule you should use the dedicated LG software LGPCSync that comes on CD along with the phone.

No change in Internet department

As much as connectivity is concerned, the phone features 3-band GSM 900/1800/1900 and GPRS support for fast data transfers, as well as Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP profile for listening music on a stereo Bluetooth headset.

The integrated WAP browser doesn't have full HTML support and managed to open only simple HTML pages such as Google. It's a regular WAP browser used in older phones.

The clumsy browser

Let's organize

The Calendar is pretty straightforward - it offers a monthly view for navigation among the dates. Once you find the date you need, simply enter it and add an event. The first day of the week according to the calendar is Sunday - something that's not that common around whole Europe.

Adding a task to the calendar

The text Memos allow for storing some notes. Each note can have a maximum of 80 characters.

Adding a text memo