LG KG920 review: 5 megapixel exotic

A touch away

The LG KG920 has a wonderful display, although... we would have liked it better if it was larger. It has a diagonal of 2” and a QVGA resolution of 320x240 pixels. The TFT display can display up to 256K colors. It stays legible even under direct sunlight, although it fades slightly. The backlighting strength is good enough and there are several brightness levels you can choose from according to the environment.

KG920 display in the dark

As we already discussed, the strange design of the keypad proves to be a certain drawback to its ergonomics. Yet those problems seem to disappear with the time and one gets used to it. The feedback of the keys is great and it’s easy to type your messages.

The keys are evenly lit in red and are readily visible in the dark as you may see for yourselves.

KG920 keypad in the dark

Caller ID

When it comes to using the KG920 as an ordinary everyday mobile phone, we were very pleased with how it performed. Signal reception was nice, so was the voice clarity. Speaking of voice quality we would have liked it if the voices sounded a bit deeper. Volume-wise the KG920 has one of the loudest loudspeakers we have seen recently and there is not a chance that you would miss a call in the street. The only problem is that when you walk into a room you have to lower the volume level because in a quiet room environment it’s more than what your colleagues would tolerate. The vibration strength is also very high so you won’t miss a call even if you set the mobile in a silent mode.

An insider’s look

The standby screen of the handset displays info about the battery status and signal strength. The carrier’s name can be turned off and we find that a really pleasant feature that should be seen in other phones too. In standby the two soft keys correspond to the Main Menu and the Contacts menu.

Standby screen

The main menu is a 3 x 4 grid matrix of icons which get zoomed in when you select them. We must admit that the overall color scheme and icons match perfectly the design of the KG920.

Main menu

The submenus are viewed as a list. Generally speaking the LG KG920 lacks any complicated settings and doesn’t require long set-ups. Here are the nice wallpapers that come preinstalled.

Preset wallpapers

In standby the four navigation keys each have a predefined shortcut function. Pressing the LEFT key takes you to the Profile shortcut menu. Pressing the DOWN key naturally takes you to the Phonebook list. Pressing the RIGHT key takes you to a special functional menu that allows you to open the Messages menu, check your voicemail messages, schedule an appointment in the Organizer or schedule an Alarm. Pressing the UP key takes you to the Favorites menu which is a list of shortcuts which is user-configurable.

Standby screen shortcut menu

It’s a good thing that all the menu items have numeric shortcuts assigned to them. You can see those in front of every menu item while browsing the menu.

Numeric shortcut icons in the beginning of each row