LG KU970 Shine review: A Vodafone touch

Call management

Nothing special in the call records department. They are available as a separate item in the main menu and also can be accessed by pressing the call (receiver) key. In fact pressing the call key takes you to the general list of all dialed, received and missed calls. If you wish to see the separate registers you have to go to the abovementioned Call History menu item. There is no data counter available as with previous models.

Call register menu

Messaging comes enhanced too

The phone supports the sending and receiving of SMS, EMS, MMS and email messages.

When you start a new message you are given the option of choosing among a text message or an email. In KE970 we even saw Bluetooth message as an available option but it isn’t one here. 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. As with KE970 the EMS functionality is not on the level of the original LG Chocolate for some unknown reason. There you could type with highlighted text, set the text alignment, etc. None of those features is available here.

Messages menu • typing a test message

The message typing is assisted by T9. Something that isn’t available here is the Auto Draft saving that the KE970 and the other LG mobiles perform - 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 the next time you decide to start a new message the phone not only stores it for you but automatically opens it for you to continue.

The email client supports the POP3, IMAP4 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. It comes pre-configured for the Vodafone live! email service but new accounts can be added. As regards emails with file attachments a nice development is that it allows sending or downloading messages with attachments of up to 1 MB. In all the previous models the maximum size was only 300KB.

All the right stuff

The LG KU970 has 512MB of integrated memory and no memory card slot. The effectively available memory to the user in fact is around 488MB. The File manager appears as a My files item in the main menu. It includes separate factory preset folders for different multimedia content. In fact these folders are the only one you will see since the file manager doesn’t actually support user-created folders. You can create subfolders you cannot add ones to the root of the My Files. You can mark, copy or move files only within the designated multimedia group. For example you cannot copy image files to the music folder. Then again you can of course copy or move files to the external memory or send them through Bluetooth connection and for all of those options you can rely on multiple marking.

My Files menu

The LG KE970 managed to impress us with its office document viewer functionality. It’s a rather innovative feature for a non-OS mobile phone and it’s certainly a first for LG GSM mobile phones. The viewer supports MS Word documents, MS Excel files and PDF files. Unfortunately, no such support was found in KU970 – it isn’t even capable of opening plain TXT files.

On the other hand, the KU970 does support user-created playlists much like the KE970 and the player can run in the background. So we are not pretty clear about where to position the device as to its music orientation.

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Generally speaking, the file browser of the LG KU970 provides basic functionality. As with LG KE970 you no longer need to view picture files by opening and closing them one by one as it was with the original LG Chocolate phone. You can view pictures fullscreen and you can even see the pictures in their full size while making use of a nice browsing feature. Unfortunately the landscape view functionality that we saw in KE970 lacks here.

As in KE970 the thumbnail view browsing of the available pictures has received a speed boost and now it works much more natural. It has got to be pointed out though that the KE970 manages to load the thumbnails quicker than the KU970.

List and thumbnail view • Opening an image

Zooming in on a picture

Playing some music

The lack of memory card slot, a flight mode, and playlist support made the music player of the original LG Chocolate rather inadequate. Some of those issues have been taken care of in the LG KE800 Chocolate Platinum. But still, it lacked an option for creating custom playlists – its player listed all the available MP3 files. The KE970 Shine however now supports user-created playlists and we are pretty happy with it. The only downside is that as with all previous models you can’t sort the tracks according to artist or album but only by file name.

Now the music player of the KU970 is entirely a different story. The device itself doesn’t have a memory card slot (all you have are the 512MB on board) and doesn’t feature a Flight mode – obviously the lack of those two features alone makes the KU970 inappropriate choice for a music phone.

On the other hand, the KU970 does support user-created playlists much like the KE970 and the player can run in the background. So we are not pretty clear about where to position the device as to its music orientation. Obviously the people who made it don’t have a clear idea about it either. Vodafone is well known for their disapproval of MP3 maybe due to licensing reasons. They’ve been known to actually strip some Vodafone-branded mobiles of their MP3 support.

Music player

Furthermore the music player doesn’t have any equalizer presets that you can use in order to enhance the player sound.

The sound is really nice when you use stock headphones without turning on some special equalizer preset. However, when you use the supplied LG headphones you would definitely feel the lack of the equalizer for tuning in the sound.

The LG Shine headset