LG KF510 review: Shinier than Shine

Display is reasonably sized, with good picture quality

LG KF510 is equipped with a 2.2" 262K-color LCD TFT display of QVGA resolution. It's pretty much the golden mean given today's feature phone display standards.

The picture quality is on the good side, excelling in brightness and contrast levels. Sunlight legibility has also improved compared to, say, the LG KU990 Viewty. This doesn't necessarily make it great. It is still hard to find a proper angle for working with the phone when outside on a sunny day, but at least it is possible.

The medium-sized display has very good picture quality

Keypad is great

LG KF510 is a real texting-friendly device with its large keys. They are also nicely elevated at the center, which benefits touch orientation greatly. Typing was a sheer pleasure after only a few hours spent with the KF510.

The keypad of LG KF510 is the heavy texter's best friend

We're still sitting on the fence as far as the touchpad is concerned. There is no doubt that it brings some fun to using the LG KF510. However, we do find navigation with regular press keys a bit easier, even though the KF510 also features haptic feedback. Not that it is something you cannot get used to but it does take its time. Other than that, the touch pad has its positives. For example it allows quick scrolling by sweeping your finger across, which is impossible with normal D-pads. By the way sweeping is not an option with Samsung's navigation displays in E950 and U900.

LG KF510 is armed with one of the largest touchpads

The backlighting of both the touch pad and the keypad is strong enough. It is not really even but the illumination of the touch pad makes the LG KF510 one of the best looking phones in the dark.

LG KF510 simply loves the dark

Telephony

When it comes to telephony, we have no complaints with LG KF510. It offers good reception and great in-call sound. Voice quality is good on both ends of a call. Besides, the phone has nice interface and dialing a number or calling a contact from the phonebook is easy and pleasant.

Calling Dexter on LG KF510

We also put the little fella to our traditional loudspeaker test. Here is how it ranks along some of the other handsets in the same challenge. As you can see, it's an average performer, standing about halfway our table. You can find more information about the test itself and the whole list of tested devices here.

User interface in full color

The user interface of LG KF510 does add to the sleek looks. It is very user-friendly and generally really quick and responsive. In addition, the black and white icons we saw in LG KF600 are now traded for full color. This is a very welcome improvement and we do appreciate the new styling.

The new colorful icons benefit the user interface

The standby screen has information about the current time and date, as well as the typical status readings. It shows signal strength, the active profile and the battery status. In standby mode the touch pad features 4 shortcuts, which can be customized to best suit the user's needs. Each of those is attached to one of the directions, while the center is responsible for entering the main menu. You can also make small icons appear in the middle of the stand-by screen indicating the shortcuts attached to each direction key.

The standby screen with and without the shortcut icons

The menu structure of LG KF510 is straightforward and easy to work with. Except for a few strangely placed settings everything else is perfectly logical. The different files and features are exactly where you would expect them to be even if you have never held an LG handset before.

The touch pad is the main option for navigating the menus. You can also use keypad shortcuts, with alphanumeric keys linked to icons on the screen (depending on the menu). Unluckily there was no setting about the haptic feedback of the touch pad. We did appreciate the wide ranging customization the KF600 offered and we would've liked it better if the KF510 was capable of doing the same. Still the feedback is good enough, even if we found it a bit delayed on some occasions. We didn't however have any trouble navigating the phone for the time of our review.