The smooth black front is dominated by the 3in display, a 240 x 400, 262,000-colour touchscreen that’s smaller and less detailed than the Apple one.
Round the back, the camera lens protrudes just a few millimetres from smooth graphite-grey surface. LG has ditched the Viewty’s round-the-lens zoom control for a more conventional rocker key. Around the lens is a sliding cover.
Pressing the main menu button pulls up a side bar of four sub menu category icons
The smart-looking front and back panels are covered by sheets of glossy plastic which are typically smudge-attracting. A small low-res video-call camera sits anonymously above the Renoir’s screen, while three control buttons are arranged below the display – regular Call and End buttons, plus a key for calling up a list of currently running applications.
The LG Renoir is built around a UI to that's like the one used on previous LG touchscreen phones. There have been improvements and enhancements along the way, and the new one feels a more responsive. Scrolling is smoother, for instance, and flicking through lists more fluid.
Haptic feedback lets you know when buttons have been properly pressed - levels for this vibrating feedback can be adjusted. The Renoir’s UI doesn't deliver quite the easy user-friendliness and slickness of the iPhone, but it does the job.
The home screen has a row of four icons along the bottom for phone dialing, the contacts book, messaging and the main menu. Above and to the right of them, there’s a small ‘W’ that pulls up a toolbar of widgets at the bottom of the screen, representing a limited selection of applications you can have on your home screen: music player, FM radio, photo gallery, clocks, calendar, notes, speed dialing and an Accuweather online weather forecast.
COMMENTS
@Neil Alexander
Facually incorrect.
GPS uses some fancy maths to work out where it is in relation to certain GPS System (RAS Syndrome?) satellites, based on the delay between sending by the satellite and reception by the device. Devices overhead will be closer than those at other angles to the location, so the GPS receiver can work out where it is from comparing the delay from several sources.
A-GPS makes this easier by downloading the appropriate information based on the location of the nearest Cell over a data connection. This makes the guesswork / mathwork of the GPS receiver take far less time, as it already has reference information for where satellites SHOULD be relative to its (approximate) current position. It can also allow the device to approximate what a GPS signal SHOULD be telling it if the signal drops, allowing for better connectivity within buildings and under cover (to a certain extent).
Re: The A-GPS on our sample was quick to get a satellite fix
A-GPS doesn't use satellites. Unlike vanilla GPS, A-GPS uses phone masts to determine it's location. Can we please decide whether we are talking about GPS or A-GPS here?
No ijesus competitor
It's just an 8mp cameraphone (probably with a tiny sensor to it will be horribly compressed and worse than a decent 5mp sensor), not a smartphone.
And I bet..
.. it's got all the same problems as my old Viewty, inconsistent UI, over-compressed imaging, hopeless multi-tasking, poor multimedia player, promises that glitches will be fixed in "an update" etc etc.
The Viewty was the first phone I ever PAID to get out of a contract to get away from... Never another LG phone as long as I live. All they're interested in is being able to boast bigger numbers for each feature, no thought to the end-user experience. And if you find a bug, tough, LG are too busy looking at their next great handset to be bothered going back and fixing the issue...
hmm, 6 pages and I could not find....
a long article, not to badly written, how ever. What about its spec?, how does it compair to other 8MP phones? like the samsung, i found the other comments very intresstig as i am in the market.
The samsung 8510 comes with 8Gb internal and upto 16Gb cards (which are about £40 each atm).
What codecs does the vieaty thingy support?, can it charge off a standard usb port.
So on top of that, 8MP is not really all that awsome that it can not be compaired to 5Mp phones.
/rant
