LG KF700 preview: First look

Flashy user interface

The user interface of LG KF700 is Flash- based, much like the one in LG Viewty. There are a number of novelties compared to the LG Viewty.

Firstly, there is a new centralized menu for managing profiles, music player and Bluetooth connectivity. It also displays the memory status. To access it, you just need to press the upper part of the screen in standby or in the main menu.

The new menu with status readings

Next, there is new handling of desktop widgets - all of them are hidden onto a sliding pane to the right. You can easily choose which one of them to show on the desktop by sliding out the pane. When you are done you just hide it away.

The new Home screen widgets

Then, there is a new navigation row of icons, which is available across all submenus. The icons are shortcuts to applications such as the task manager, phonebook, messaging and homescreen.

The new navigation bar appears everywhere

And finally, the scroll wheel - the new navigation solution on the side of the handset - brings along its own customizable dial-shaped shortcut menu. However, since the scroll wheel is two-directional only (you can't press it) - you have to start the menu manually pressing the OK key right next to it.

The side scroll wheel is not that impressive

The scroll wheel can be used throughout the whole menu system, however scrolling with it is painfully slow especially in long enough lists. The scrolling flips through one item at a time and you have to scroll like hell to go faster.

Other than that, the same old navigation bar with shortcuts sits on the bottom of the screen. The four available shortcuts are not user configurable. The first shortcut takes you to the Dial pad for you to punch in a number, the second opens the Contacts list, the third one opens the Messaging submenu, and the last one takes you to the main menu.

The traditional Home screen shortcuts and the Dial pad

Beside all that, the user interface of the LG KF700 retains the same menu system as the LG Viewty - simple, yet impressively sophisticated. LG have made a really nice job designing the user interface system.

The main menu consists of four submenus - they are displayed in a column on the right-hand side of the screen. They don't have names but the first one contains elements related to making calls and sending messages. The second one is the entertainment package, which houses the multimedia files, the camera, the FM radio, the games, and the music player. The third submenu includes tools such as the web browser, the Google package, organizer applications such as the Calendar, the Calculator, the Unit converter, etc. And finally, the fourth item handles all the settings.

The four sub-menus: calling and texting • multimedia • various tools • settings

By default, the user interface comes in the black and white theme, well-known ever since the LG Prada phone. Beside that default one, the LG KF700 has another color theme as well.

Applying a more lively interface theme

An absolute must-have for every full touch-based handset, and a feature we miss in the Apple iPhone, is some sort of feedback when the screen is pressed - something besides the touch tone and the touch animation. LG KF700 is haptic-enabled, which means that every press is accompanied by a gentle vibration, that let's you know your press has been accepted. Settings for it include a choice of three types of vibration plus 7 levels of vibration strength.

Touch feedback (haptics) settings

Unlike the LG Viewty however, there is no on-screen QWERTY keyboard, and there is no handwriting recognition either. Now you have a sliding hardware keypad always at hand.

Excellent multimedia performance

The LG KF700 comes with a good 176MB of internal memory (the Viewty had only 100MB) and of course there is a microSD memory card slot. Again, unlike the Viewty, the memory card slot is on the top of the device so hot-swapping cards is definitely an option.

The KF700 file manager appears as the My stuff item in the menu. It includes separate factory-preset folders for different multimedia content. Unlike some of the recent LG phones we reviewed, we had no problem here reading custom folders off the memory card.

The file manager • peeking in the Documents folder

You can copy or move files to the external memory or send them via Bluetooth, and for all of those options you can rely on multiple selection. However, we did notice a huge lag in folder browsing, once the memory card started to fill up.

The main functionality of the image gallery remains the same as the one of the Viewty phone. Browsing images is even faster than the Viewty.

Browsing images is effortless in both portrait and landscape • zooming in

The LG KF700 offers the same MP3 player as the Viewty. You can filter tracks as with any other modern music player - by artist, album, genre, playlist, recently played and few more. The handset itself has a Flight mode, which really makes it an adequate solution as a portable music player. There are still no equalizer settings for you to use to enhance the player sound. The music player skin now changes to match the currently selected interface theme - in the Viewty it always stayed black.

The music player is excellent but still no equalizer presets

Naturally, the music player runs in the background problem-free. The same goes for the FM radio, too. As opposed to the Viewty you can now listen to the radio on the handset loudspeaker - that's a basic feature but it lacked in the LG Viewty. The radio stores up to 24 stations - double the amount available in the LG Viewty. However the radio misses the RDS functionality found in the Viewty - you can only enter a radio station ID manually.

FM radio has double the station memory slots now

The video player of the LG KF700 is much like the one seen in the Viewty - it is really nice and you can watch videos in fullscreen landscape mode, with or without semi-transparent overlay of player controls. You can also opt for both normal and widescreen aspect ratio. Unfortunately, the DivX playback support lacks here.

Video player

Another downer is the lacking YouTube integration of the KF700 and you can't upload your video files directly from the file manager. That of course may be subject to change as it happened with the LG Viewty.