LG GC900 Viewty Smart

Once you've taken your pics you can adjust them for colour and brightness, as well as blur or sharpen them, and add some fun effects, such as oil painting and cartoon filters, as well as a raindrop effect and the frankly bizarre Fog Drawing, which allows you to 'breathe' on your pics and then write in the 'condensation' on the screen.

Fog drawing, for the dewy eyed

Playing back video on the 480x800-pixel screen looked great, and there are options to expand even widescreen movie trailers to full screen viewing. it supports a very broad range of video formats (H.263, H.264, MP4, WMV, ASF, DivX and Xvid), as well as audio codecs (MP3, AC3, AAC/AAC+/E-AAC+/AMR-NB/WB/WB+, WMA/WMA Pro, Ogg Vorbis and MIDI).

The music player features an equaliser with 22 presets including a bass boost. There's also Dolby Mobile noise reduction, but this had the effect of making the music sound so compressed, that we gave up on it.

In contrast to the rest of the phone, but no real surprise from LG, the supplied headphones are cheap and nasty, with an unacceptable degree of hiss and too-narrow dynamic range, very little bass and distortion creeping in all too easily at the high end.

Fortunately, there's a 3.5mm adaptor with a long 80cm lead for connecting a better set of headphones to LG's power port. Or you can use a wireless Bluetooth headset. We liked the FM radio though, which comes with 30 presets and a funky little virtual dial interface.

Supplied headphones are best seen but not heard

You can connect to the Internet using the Viewty Smart's fast HSDPA 3G (up to 7.2Mbps download) network connection, or even faster broadband via Wi-Fi. The browser allows you to zoom in or out by pinching with two fingers. It's not quite as smooth as the iPhone's multi-touch operation, but it's not bad. There's a YouTube app and LG has done a deal with Blogger, allowing you to upload pics and updates direct to your blog.