LG KE970 Shine

LG's Black Label series has made a strong attempt to cover the market in a blanket of of eye-candy Chocolate – those sleek-looking, slightly under-specced phones with the touchy-feely hidden buttons.

Part of the Black Label series, if only in name, is the equally eye-catching but totally different Shine. Different, in that it's not in the least bit black, but also that the only part of the case that's touch-sensitive is its standard buttons.

First, though, the look; if it's true that the phone you choose is a reflection of your self, then the Shine is to pretty much to everyone's taste. The front is a perfect mirror when it's in repose, with just a couple of soft keys and a unique type of scroll bar beneath it.

It's slim, but hefty enough not to feel too girly – that slightly magnifying mirror will be fine for checking make-up or beard stubble. But be warned, it's a smudge magnet. The rest of the metal casing has a nice brushed chrome effect, and it all adds up to the Shine looking very classy and attention-grabbing.

A button on the side gets you straight into the 2-megapixel camera, which has a 2x zoom, photo light and some basic editing facilities. It takes an age to focus and shoot though, so don't expect to be capturing too many magic moments, unless they're perfectly still.

There's another dedicated side button for the MP3 player, which comes with some surprisingly good headphones (a great improvement over the tinny front-mounted speaker) and plays all flavours of iTunes-friendly AAC tracks. Tracks are listed alphabetically and there's no option for searching by genre, album and so on, though there is a shuffle function and 50MB of memory on board, with the option of a 2.5GB microSD card. There's stereo Bluetooth, too, if you prefer your headphones wireless.

The Shine comes with two games, both of which make use of that unusual scroll bar – you roll the middle bit for up and down, but there are an additional two soft keys for left and right. They're very small, but they can be easily pressed even with fairly chunky thumbs. BubbleSoccer asks you to break up lines of different coloured balls, Breakout-style, but with a football theme, and requires much fast-thumbing on the scroll bar, which feels very robust. More frantic thumbing is required for Fishing Mania; this takes you from Hawaii to Phuket in search of tuna and sailfish.

Graphics on both of these look less than inspiring, despite the undoubted quality of the 262,000-colour screen, which shows off pictures and games very nicely and there's also a document viewer that enables you to see Word, Powerpoint, Excel and PDF files that you receive via email.

Once you slide the screen up, the keypad is large and reasonably responsive, though it looks like one of the old-style Motorola RAZR keypads and there's not a great deal of definition between the buttons – not good for feeling your way around.

Although we played with the standard GSM version of the Shine, there's also a 3G model available with 3, which bags you video calling and instant messaging, though for some reason you lose the microSD slot and document viewer.

This is definitely a style phone first, and everything else follows that lead. The challenge of battling with that unusual scroll bar apart, there's little here to tempt serious gamers and besides the camera there's not a great deal for phone fans either. Fashion phone fanatics, however, should form an orderly queue.