The geniuses who name products at LG have not exercised their creativity on the KF510. Therefore, it does not carry silly monikers such as a rather contrived fusion of the words view and beauty, as a stable mate does. Neither is it named after a planet, nor is it a secret.
At first glance, it looks a sleek, stylish technological tour de force that perhaps Captain Kirk would use to say: "Beam me up Scotty". Sleek and stylish it surely is, but a technological wonder it is not. It has a good deal more show to it than go.
The two available colours – a burnished, metallic grey and a deep maroonish red – are graduated from deeper to lighter shades, top to bottom. Even with one of the glossiest of glossy casings, the surface does not smudge as easily as most other gadgets flaunting similar exteriors.
Its slim 110 gramme body is a pleasure to hold and fits most palms in a very comfortable way. The slider action, which reveals the keypad underneath, has a quality feel to it, as if you could play slide and seek all weekend and it would still open and close with the same reassuring click. But while the appearance is a joy to behold, the keypad is a let down. It felt cheap and tacky for such a good-looking gadget. Texting could have been a whole a lot easier with a more ergonomic design and tactile keys, as well as without the top-heavy feel with the slider open.
LG's standout feature in this phone – the touch sensitive navigation pad – ends up standing out for all the wrong reasons. Flashing different light patterns depending on how you're scrolling, the pad allows you to flick up and down and left and right, just like a trackpad on a laptop. Sounds cool on paper but use for a bit and it starts to get frustrating. The touch-sensitive keys, which vibrate when you tap them, were slow and unresponsive. Despite being fun to flick, for greater practicality we would have preferred a mechanical navigation pad.
In fact, this one feature was so irritating that the 3Mp camera and the superb MP3 player all failed to compensate. That coupled with only a 16Mb internal memory – expandable via micro SD – and lack of 3G and wifi, means a limited capability for business applications.
To sum up, this is a good looking everyday phone with no exceptional features with a touch pad and slider that makes you feel like a real dandy when using it. Before it frustrates you, that is.
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