LG Viewty Smart

If the output of the past few years is anything to go by, then LG has significantly stepped up its game in the mobile phone industry. We’ve seen the Secret, Arena, Renoir and Viewty: all impressive, feature-packed handsets aimed at style-conscious consumers.

That trend looks set to continue with the Viewty Smart, a more powerful sequel to the original Viewty. Its predecessor was - as the name suggested - designed with snap-happy mobile photographers in mind and boasted a high-quality 5 megapixel camera.

The Viewty Smart naturally trumps its older relation by rocking an 8 megapixel variant, and this is arguably the centrepiece of the entire phone. While imaging experts continue to inform us that megapixel size isn’t everything when it comes to photo quality, we were blown away by the snaps produced by LG’s latest handset.

Not only are the images pin-sharp and packed with detail, but the colour balance is excellent and we feel that this phone will comfortably oust your dedicated point-and-shoot digital camera from its coveted position in your jacket pocket.

It’s not just the standard of the snaps that impresses, either: the range of options available is also noteworthy. Several different shot modes are available, including one that promises to make all of your snaps beautiful (although the success of this procedure naturally depends on the initial attractiveness of the subject matter - don’t go shooting a pig and expecting a work of art).

Putting aside the photographic prowess of the Viewty Smart for a moment, the phone exhibits the typically high standards showcased by pretty much every handset that comes out of LG’s factories these days.

The design is slim, light and robust - a world apart from the chunky Viewty Mk1 - although we have to admit we were slightly disappointed to discover that the back of the phone is plastic, even though it appears to be brushed metal.

The front of the device is dominated by the capacitive touch screen. The only other feature is a single button which works very much like the Home key on Apple’s iPhone. External controls are kept to a bare minimum and this imbues the Viewty Smart with a sophisticated and uncluttered look.

LG’s S-Class interface - which made its debut with the Arena - makes a return, albeit in a slightly nippier guise. It’s still not quite as swift as we’d like, but the delay when switching between menus is less pronounced: clearly this phone is packing beefier hardware under the bonnet.

From a gaming perspective the Viewty Smart mixes old and new. Alongside LG favourites Tepong, Wheel Mania and Flying Dice we have Bubble Breeze (where you blow on the microphone to create bubbles) and Mellow Candle (which contains even more puff-related gameplay).

To be honest, the new additions are pretty tame - Mellow Candle isn’t really a game at all, but rather a glorified tech demo. Thankfully the wonderful Tepong remains as gloriously addictive as when we first saw it on the Arena.

If we were going to pick fault with the Viewty Smart (and, to be honest, that’s what we’re here for) then we’d question the wisdom of producing a phone that can take 8 megapixel photos, display DivX movies and play music, but then giving it just 1.5GB of memory. Needless to say, that storage isn’t going to go very far, although there is the option to augment it with a microSD card, at least.

Another issue is the lack of a 3.5mm headphone jack - one of our constant bugbears with pretty much every mobile phone we seem to review these days. To be fair to LG, this isn’t being marketed exclusively as a music phone, but the tiresome use of proprietary headphones still annoys us.

However, such problems fail to dampen the resoundingly positive feeling we got from the Viewty Smart. This is a sexy, powerful and versatile mobile phone produced by a company that is truly hitting its stride at presen. With product like this, it’s little wonder that LG happens to find itself being held in such high regard by consumers these days.