LG KG920 review: 5 megapixel exotic

Plug in, log on

The LG KG920 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, the internal memory and the storage card memory appear in the Windows explorer as 2 removable drives just as your regular USB flash drive would. 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 the missed calls.

Once again, when saving content to the phone don’t create subfolders since those won’t be recognized and read by the phone file system. Interesting enough, the Photos folder is reserved for the pictures taken using the phone’s camera and the access to it should be used only to transfer the pictures taken from the phone to the PC.

If you need any other type of synchronization between the KG920 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.

As much as connectivity is concerned, the LG KG920 features 3-band GSM 900/1800/1900 and GPRS support for fast data transfers. There is no 3G or EDGE support.

It also features Bluetooth with the following profiles: Headset, Handsfree Kit, File Transfer, Image printing, Dial-up networking, Business card transfer, Browsing other devices, and Serial port profile.

The integrated WAP browser doesn’t have full HTML capabilities and managed to open only simple HTML pages such as Google. It’s a regular WAP browser used in older phones and its presence here made us scratch our heads. An expensive mobile such as the LG KG920 should have better browser anyways. Even the web browser of budget Sony Ericsson models can easily beat it.

The old school browser

In a timely manner

The Organizer menu features the Calendar and the text Memos items. 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 storing some notes. Each note can have maximum 80 characters.

Sample text memo – better not forget this one

The Tools menu also stores some useful applications, though they seem rather standard nowadays. There are the Alarm clock, the Calculator, the Unit converter, the World time clock, and the Voice recorder. The Alarms menu allows for the setting of 5 different alarms which could be repeated Mon-Fri, Mon-Sat or Everyday.

Alarm menu

The Calculator offers rich scientific functions which are pretty out of place having in mind the mediocre technical capabilities of the rest of the phone.

The overcomplicated calculator

The Unit Converter also has a nice list of units such as Currency, Area, Length, Weight, Temperature, Volume, Velocity, and Shoes & Clothes (both very interesting ones).

Unit converter application • converting shoes and clothes sizes

The Voice recorder application has a 20 seconds limitation and what is more the microphone is so insensitive that the application is nearly unusable unless directly spoken to.

The 20 sec voice recorder

Here we also find the setting for the Favorites menu which we spoke of earlier – the one with user-defined shortcuts which you invoke in standby by pressing the UP key on the touchpad.

A mind of logic

The phone we tested had two preinstalled games – the ZooZoo and Othello. Both are classic logic board games. If you are into games of logic, those would definitely seem as a pleasurable pastime.

ZooZoo & Othello games

Final words…

As we draw this review to an end it’s somewhat hard for us to rate the LG KG920. It seems as though that the drawbacks are far too serious to keep out of consideration – the slow camera and the slow image browsing being among the most serious ones. The lack of a proper web browser is really puzzling in these days of high-speed mobile data transfers, where web browsing has turned into a daily routine.

Anyways, when we put it straight – what type of person would buy this mobile? Well it seems like one that likes gadgets, a shutterbug that would like to have a high-quality digital camera always at hand. Well, the KG920 manages to deliver in that department since the pictures taken have a superb quality for a mobile phone. One can get used to the slow camera interface and the strange camera shutter key, no doubt about it. Once you manage to do that, you would most definitely be amazed how fun it could be to use the KG920 in your everyday life.