LG KG920 review: 5 megapixel exotic

Pick one

The phonebook is about average and all we can say about it is that it does its job on a satisfactory level. The phonebook doesn’t have a dedicated main menu icon; instead, strangely enough, it’s positioned under the Organizer menu item.

The phonebook capacity is 1000 contacts which is more than enough for most users. Search is performed through gradual typing of a name’s characters. The phonebook allows the storing of 4 numbers /mobile, home, office, fax/ and an email. Further on, the contact can be included into a caller group or can be assigned a picture. All the available options are showed into separate screens. Generally the phonebook interface has a clumsy design and reminds the phonebook interface of older mobile phones regarding the way the options are ordered and altered.

Phonebook search • Different contact fields: clumsy and inconvenient

An interesting solution is the option to view the contacts list along with the respective pictures.

Viewing the contacts with pictures

Another limitation of the phonebook is that you cannot assign a ringtone to a certain contact of your choice. The only way to do that is by including the contact in a caller group and assigning a specific ringtone to the caller group itself. The KG920 has several preinstalled caller groups which can be customized.

Each caller group has its icon and that can be shown in front of the respective members’ names in the contacts list in order to recognize easily which group they belong to.

Caller groups list with their respective icons

Yet another limitation of the phonebook is that you cannot save a second or a third number to an already existing contact directly from the standby screen. For that you have to find the contact in the phonebook and enter the Edit mode.

Call management

Nothing special in the call records department. They are available as a separate item in the main menu and can also be accessed by pressing the call (receiver) key on the touch pad. In fact pressing the call key takes you to the general list of all dialed, received and missed calls. It has a capacity of 20 numbers. If you wish to see the separate registers you have to go to the abovementioned Call Register menu item. The GPRS data counter is also available in the Call Register menu.

Call register menu

Messaging: heart-warming

The LG KG920 supports the sending and receiving of SMS, EMS, MMS and email messages. Generally speaking, the LG messaging machine managed to surprise us with a few nice features.

When you start a new message you are given the option of choosing among a text message, multimedia message and an email message. If you choose the text type further on you could easily change it by just attaching multimedia content to it and thus turn it into an EMS or MMS.

Messages menu • starting a new message

The phone supports EMS release 5, so it is capable of sending color pictures, sounds, text styles, etc. The message typing is assisted by T9. A thing we noticed is that in order to type a number in your message you need to change to numeric mode (123) and then when you are done, go back to the text mode (abc). That’s really bugging if you have to enter frequently numbers in your messages. It would have been nicer if one could enter numbers by long press of the respective keys which is a standard feature in almost all contemporary phones.

One nice feature is that if you have started a new message and all of a sudden you have to cancel its typing, it’s saved automatically as a draft and next time you decide to start a new message the KG920 not only stores it for you but offers you to continue it from where you left it last time.

Previous draft readily available

Another nice feature is that the KG920 keeps a record of the last numbers you have sent messages to and when sending a new one you can choose among them instead of digging down in the full phonebook list. It’s a feature we would like to see in more phones nowadays.

Recent recipients list is a favorite feature

Another interesting option here allows for typing of color highlighted text. Furthermore there are three available input text sizes as well as options for formatting the text in Italics, Bold, Underline, Strikethrough styles… You could also align the text in the left, right or center portion of the screen. Receiving that kind of formatted text depends on the EMS version support of the recipient’s mobile device.

Typing a message • text formatting options

The email client supports the POP3 and SMTP protocols and as regards sending and receiving text emails it successfully does it job as we managed to found out during the test period. Regarding emails with file attachments it poses rather strict limitations. The maximum size of one sent message is 300 KB along with the attachments, and the maximum size of one received message is 300 KB. In case you have received message with more than 5 attachments, only 5 of them will be received. For each e-mail account you may save up to 50 messages (totally 150 for three accounts), while in the Inbox you can store up to 30 messages for each account. The other 20 slots are reserved for the Drafts and Outbox folders. A good thing is that there is an option to provide a separate username and password for the SMTP server.