Here Is The Latest Review On LG Shine !!

LG SHINE

General

• Date Announced: First Quarter 2007
• Date Released: Coming Soon
• Mode: GSM triband 900 / 1800 / 1900
• Dimensions: 99.8 x 50.6 x 13.7 mm
• Battery Type: Lithium-Ion (800 mAh)
• Battery Life: 180 mins talk time, 280 hours standby time
• Weight: 125 grams
• Form Factor: Silder
• Phone book: 1000 + Sim
• Display Type: 262144 colour, TFT, (240 x 320 pixels)
• Expansion Slot: Yes (microSD ,Trase-Flash)
• Form Factor: Silder
• Games: Yes
• Polyphonic Ringtones: Yes (40 chords, MP3 support)
• Vibrating Alert: Yes

Connectivity

• Bluetooth: Yes
• EDGE: Yes
• E-Mail client: Yes
• Bluetooth: Yes
• EDGE: Yes
• E-Mail client: Yes
• GPRS: Yes
• HSCSD: No
• Headset Jack: No
• Instant Messaging: No
• Infrared (IR): No
• Java Apps (J2ME): Yes (MIDP 2.0)
• MMS: Yes
• Synchronization: Yes
• SMS: Yes
• USB: Yes (Mass storage device)
• WAP: Yes (2.0)
• Wi-Fi (802.11b): No

Organiser Functions

• Internet Browser: Yes (xHTML)
• Onboard Memory: 60 MB
• Picture ID: Yes
• Voice Memo: Yes

Special Functions

• Camera: Yes (2 megapixels)
• Flashlight: Yes
• FM Radio: No
• GPS: No
• Mp3 Player: Yes
• Streaming Multimedia: Yes
• Video Recording: Yes

LG Shine KE970 Mobile Phone - Detailed Review

Hot on the heels of the highly successful LG Chocolate Mobile Phone, LG is adding a completely new style of handset to their Black Label series of mobile phones — the LG Shine KE970.

LG seem to have come a long way with this new model, which sports a completely different build style and is, overall, far more advanced than their Chocolate KG800.

Hardware

It’s brilliant to see that LG have moved away from the unresponsive touch-pad buttons of the Chocolate KG800 and towards solid buttons which are much more usable and won’t break down or freak out after a few months.

LG has also added a good scroll wheel to the device on the main body, just under the screen. This becomes your main navigational tool, and is an excellent way of finding what you want on the device. It makes a big difference to have this when, say, searching through your contact list.

Although the scroll wheel isn’t perfectly refined, and you might inadvertently scroll a little too much every now and then, it is a welcome addition. You’ll quickly learn to love it. Two little buttons accompany the scroll wheel directly on the right and left, which effectively turn it into up-down-left-right scrolling pad when the software allows it.

The scroll wheel is also a press-down button, which often acts as the main ‘select’ button.

Other buttons lie along the right-hand side of the phone, where there is a noticeable lack of a ‘cancel-and-exit’ button which came in handy with the LG Chocolate. Now they’ve decided to hide it away on a slide-down keypad, which can be a little fustrating. Nevertheless, the camera and MP3 player now have their separate buttons on the side, which makes it much easier to quickly take a snap.

Audio call quality on the LG Shine is great, when you’re able to get a signal. One of the problems I’m having with this phone is it’s unusually poor reception of signal in low-signal areas, which is only made worse by it not updating it’s read-out of signal strength often. It can make using the phone a little stressful when you know there is signal where you are but it doesn’t pick any up.

The screen is beautiful at 240×360 2.2-inch, which is a very pixel-dense display and makes for much better on-screen graphics. It is the same resolution as an iPod 5G screen, but slightly smaller. It’s perfectly easy to use it in almost any indoor environment, but outside on a bright day you might have to strain your eyes a little to see the screen.

The camera is all right – it can do a decent resolution image in broad daylight without many problems, although (typically of 99% of mobile phone cameras) it’s more or less rubbish. LG really can’t do much about this, it’s a physics thing. They’ve made a phone with a camera, not a camera with a phone (such as the Sony CyberShot, which is actually a very competent camera). They have, however, made a slight design mistake by putting the camera on the outside, rather than hiding it away with a slide. This has already made grease gather on the lens, making pictures blurry.

Finally, through the power/data connector on the side of the phone (which is hidden by an improved pivot-based flap this time), you can plug the Shine into your computer and it behaves the same as a USB flash device, which makes it really easy to put music or take photos off of it. You can also upgrade the 50MB internal memory with a MicroSD card.

Software

The software phone come on is, in my opinion, crucial to the performance of the device. Specifications are meaningless unless the phone’s software makes it easy to use and functional.

I am extremely pleased to say that the LG Shine shows great improvement in its software when compared with the LG Chocolate.

The general interface of the phone is great thanks to good use of the scroll wheel and a very nice system font. The font is anti-aliased and looks great in a wide variety of sizes, while the scroll wheel makes it so much easier to navigate through the phone (especially when dealing with long contacts lists).

Overall, LG have produced an interface with makes far more sense, and you’ll notice this as soon as you start to use the device.

Calling is a simple affair, but the LG Shine has brought some nice extra in-call features to the party, with a speakerphone, call holding, in-call text messaging, in-call contacts browsing and, most notably, call recording. Call recording can be mighty useful sometimes, so it’s great to see the feature offered up. All of these features, however, can make you an awful lot more productive with the phone if you embrace them.

Texting with the KE970 is again a nicer affair… they sort of messed it up with the LG Chocolate by crippling text input slightly, but with the LG Shine text messaging is easy and fun. Seemingly improved T9 texting, along with being able to scroll through predictive text offerings makes it much easier to bash out a message. They’ve also fixed their unusual capitalisation button. Your texts also look lovely on the screen in the anti-aliased typeface.

You’re still able to text up to six people in one go, but the interface for this has degraded slightly – it’s no longer as easy to add people, but it’s by no means crippling.

Contact management in the phone sees some great improvements. I’m keeping all of my contacts on my SIM card just in case, but the Shine offers the ability to copy one or all contacts to or from the SIM, and will even delete the old copy to keep your address book in shape. No syncing with my Mac, though.

The media browser is great. As well as doing photos, 3G video and audio, it will also display Macromedia Flash files, Microsoft Office .DOC, .PPT and .XLS files and even PDFs (although it crashed when I opened an 8-page one). You can print via Bluetooth and do a slideshow.

Tools available include an single-setting alarm clock, a calendar which is benefits from the scroll wheel greatly, a calculator with good scientific functions, a stopwatch which fails when you exit that specific function, a good unit converter and a very unusual Word Clock app that looks remarkably cool.

The camera software is quite good, and gives you some great options such as focus metering and white balance, along with some colour effects and, usefully, where you want the photo saved. It feels a little bit too laggy in general for me, though.

Generally the scroll wheel is really useful, but it can feel a little slow at times. Apart from in the contacts list, it doesn’t really respond as fast as you might like it to, which can be a little awkward. At most it will mean you over/under-scroll (you really feel this in the camera), which in a way undoes it’s ease-of-use benefits, but overall it’s a nice touch. The one list I can think of where it performs as you want it to is the contacts list (and thank goodness, because if it didn’t I don’t think I’d be very happy).

Finally, the KE970’s web browser sports some pleasantly surprising improvements that made me rather happy. The scroll wheel, larger screen and anti-aliased fonts make the interface far superior to the LG Chocolate and generally lovely to use. Cookies are also accepted now, which means it’s easy to quickly log back into your favourite mobile services.

Personally, I use Facebook Mobile a lot when I’m in boring lectures, and their mobile site is getting better and better. With this new browser it’s simply excellent.

Style

The LG Shine and the LG Chocolate take very different approaches to their style. While they both go for simplistic minimalist designs, the LG Chocolate looks a lot simpler, thanks to the fact that (when it is off) you can’t see any buttons at all.

The LG Shine sports four buttons and a scroll wheel, but even still it is tastefully done and looks nice and simple.

This phone is still gorgeous, but it’s a different kind of gorgeous. The LG Shine is the kind of phone you’d almost expect James Bond to carry around. It’s covered with brushed metal and metallic greys, sensible bevels and sharply defined lines. It feels heavy. It’s a man’s phone at heart, but one that a woman could get away with.

It’s actually the most masculine-looking phone I’ve ever seen, and I’m not sure that LG have recognised this and embraced it in their advertising campaigns.

The contrast couldn’t be clearer with the LG Chocolate, which is so feminine it hurts. Girls love ‘em, and far prefer them to this (I’ve not even been asking this, they’ve told me!).

So if LG play their cards right, the LG Shine might be come as ubiquitous with the men in the UK as the LG Chocolate is with the ladies at the moment.

There is one little flaw in the masculinity of the Shine, however. Simply enough, when it’s off, the display reverts into a total (although slightly dull) mirror. It is the most functional pocket mirror I’ve ever seen in my life.

Overall

Hardware

* Good: Fine call quality, very good screen, decent camera, excellent scroll wheel and improved buttons, better connector cover, expandable memory, slide-concept.
* Bad: Poor signal reception and monitoring, screen hard to see in bright daylight, camera lens not protected by slide, no hard-reset, slide is strong and can nip you occasionally.

Software

* Good: Vastly improved interface, good use of scroll wheel, anti-aliased font, speakerphone, call recording, good in-call functionality, improved texting, great contact management, great contact list access, thumbnail browsing, versatile media previewing, printing via Bluetooth, scientific calculator, good unit converter, amazing World Clock, good camera settings, brilliant mobile browser.
* Bad: Odd text sending screen, one alarm clock only, stopwatch underachieves, slightly over-laggy scrolling, no flashlight-only function, poor signal strength monitoring, bizarre massive animated numbers when dialling, message and slide up/down sounds are set (and not great).

Style

* Good: Lots of nice brushed metal, very solid feel, on the heavy side, slide-concept design, extremely masculine, cool gadget feel.
* Bad: Too masculine? Too heavy? Too grey? Some unbelievably uncool ringtones.

So Here I end my Review on LG Shine ! I Hope U Enjoyed Reading It Even Though its Too LONG(LOL)