LG KS20 Review

Introduction:

Lately LG has been producing quite good looking and stylish phones and following this trend, they have recently added a new member to their line - LG KS20. It has a design almost the same as of a Prada phone, but with different functionality and purpose, for which the Windows Mobile 6 Professional and the built in WiFi contribute big time. If you are a fan of smartphones and beautiful designer pieces, this device will suit you just fine.
Similarly to Prada, LG have not left the box behind and have crafted it so it fits the design.

In it you can find:

Design:

The first impression the design gives us, is that it resembles the one of a Prada phone. The materials used are the same utilized in the popular model and help in achieving that impression. Same as with the Prada, the shiny plastic surface is a fingerprint magnet and you will have to clean your phone constantly, in order for it to look good.



What characterizes phones with such functionality is that they are bigger and heavier, but not the KS20, which impresses with its compact size and light weight. Unfortunately, when you hold it in your hand, the feeling of comfort vanishes instantaneously because of the plastic, which makes it quite light and its size, which is too small for the masculine hand.



The 2.8 inches TFT touch screen, covers 1/3 of the whole front. As it is touch-sensitive, it is used for the control of hte phone. Its specs are not any different than the rest of the phones in this class. The QVGA resolution is big enough for its physical size with small pixels, resulting in detailed images. The colors are saturated and realistic and the contrast is good. You’ll have difficulties reading it under direct sunlight even with the brightness set at maximum. Above the display are located the speaker and the video calling VGA camera, which despite the large display doesn’t stay unnoticed.

The Answer/Reject call buttons, positioned below the display are in the classic black color and with a well expressed relief, so they are easy to use. The Clear button found in PRADA is replaced with a 5-way joystick. Fundamentally, it should accommodate the navigation through the menus, but in this case, it is positioned too low, as well as the other two buttons, which makes them hard to use while holding the phone in your hand.


The volume rocker and the slot for the charger/cable, covered with a protective cover are positioned on the left side. The power button, which is used to turn the display off, the microSD slot, the fast access button and the camera button are positioned on the right-hand side. Due to the lack of a well expressed relief, pressing the side buttons, except the camera one, can sometimes be a hard task. For example, it could be quite difficult if during a call you want to turn the sound down.



The LG people have made a strange decision to put the stylus in the lower left corner, as opposed to the right side corners, as in most phones. For the majority of people this could be inconvenient, since they would have to turn the phone around in order to get the stylus. When pulling the stylus out, it extends (since it is telescopic), making it longer and more comfortable to use.

All in black, the back of the phone resembles the Prada’s back panel and the only thing standing out in one of the corners is the camera.

Interface:

LG KS20 is a Windows Mobile 6 Professional device and as a whole, its software and possibilities are almost entirely identical to the other phones using the same operating system. Nothing will surprise you if you have previously used the OS. Therefore you should bear in mind that certain problems and positive features of theirs are valid not only for the phone or make’s models, but for the models using this operating system (WM6 Professional), too.

The people from LG have modified the interface by adding a toolbar with four shortcut buttons (Menu, Dialer, Messaging menu and in our case a Vodafone menu) in the bottom of the Home Screen, like in the PRADA and the Viewty. Their purpose is to provide fast access to Menu, Dialer, Messaging menu and in this case, Vodafone menu, thus considerately facilitating work with the device. The Menu is divided in five groups –: 1)Phone functions, 2)Vodafone menu, 3)Multimedia menu, 4)Organizer, 5)Settings. There are shortcuts to the most frequently used functions in each of them, but unfortunately adding other icons in these menus is not possible.

Phonebook

Phonebook:

The KS20’s phonebook is not any different than those of other WM6 based phones. It has no restriction on the amount of contact that can be added. When you open the phonebook all contacts are displayed as a list; each field consists of the name and the number of the contact, while a letter placed beside them indicates what the type of the number is (w – work; m – mobile, etc.). Pictures are not displayed even if there is one attached to the contact.

The line displayed at the top of the screen is a search field, which starts searching through the names and numbers on entering a symbol – the more symbols you type, the more accurate the match is – it’s quite useful! This one searches all names entered for the contact, but if you want to find by other field like “company” for example, you have to use the “Search” application. There are tabs with different letters (divided in groups of three) just below it. This way you can arrange the contacts so that only the ones beginning with a given letter are displayed. These two search features are quite handy and they make finding a particular contact in the phonebook very quick.

Too bad that’s not the case when adding a new name to the phonebook; the device offers way too many capabilities, including multiple work and home numbers, but there’s only one for mobile –something quite inconvenient as that’s exactly where we wanted to add multiple numbers to. The numerous addresses, e-mail and other address fields confuse you even further – it would have been a lot easier if the most frequently used fields are highlighted in some way. We would choose this to be done with the Name, Picture, Mobile number and e-mail fields and thus finding them would have been easy, eliminating the need to go through the long list.

Personal photos and ringtones can be assigned to each contact; there’s no restriction on the size of the pictures but they are visualized in very small size even on an incoming call – we think they are useless. You can also add a note to each contact.

Dialer:

You can dial a number not included in your contacts by inputting its numbers. The phone doesn’t have a numeric keyboard and a virtual one is visualized when the Answer button is pressed. Here you can input the desired number. Information on the last dialed/received numbers will be displayed and you can call them by pressing the green receiver again.

Pressing the buttons you will start imputing the digits of a possible number, but at the same time you will search the phone book as if imputing a text by a predictive text input system. So, to call John you can press 5-6-4-6 and the matching contacts will be visualized in the list.

Organizer:

Alarms can be directly accessed through the home screen, by tapping on the clock. They are three, and they all can be configured to be active for certain days of the week, and you can also assign names and different sounds to each of them. All alarms can be active simultaneously, and overall they are easy to use and do what they are supposed to. We are rather disappointed that their number is limited to three.

The next tab in this menu is the clock; there is a field called Visiting next to it which can be used as a World Clock – select another location and the phone starts using its local time. The clock has an option to be displayed on the title bar of all the menus, which is handy.

In the Start menu you can find your electronic calendar where you can save your appointments. They have fields for subject, starting/ending time/all day event, location, notes. You can use options like: reminder (PRIOR NOTICE 1/5/10/15/30/45 minutes, 1/2/3/4/5/6 hour/day/week), recurrence (Once, Every (same-day-of-the-week), Day (same-date) of every month, Every (same date-and-month) for every year, sensitivity (normal, personal, private, confidential). You can also add attendees (required or optional) from your contacts where e-mail addresses have been added and where meeting requests will be sent.



Examining the calendar can be done by day/week/month/year and you can choose starting day for the week and the week duration (5-6-7-day week). The appointments for the day are clearly shown in their time limits, so you can see your free time at a glance.

You have Tasks menu, where you can add to-do items. For a given Task you can set subject, priority (normal, low, high), start/due date, reminder (to be notified if it’s due), category (business, holiday, personal, seasonal) and note. The Task can have recurrence (Once, Every (same-day-of-the-week), Day (same-date) of every month, Every (same date-date-and-month) for every year and sensitivity (normal, personal, private, confidential). Examining the tasks in a list you can easily see which of them are finished and which are not. The tasks options can be: sort by (status, priority, subject, start date, due date) or filter (all, recent, no categories, active, completed).

The Calculator is simple but its buttons are relatively big and can easily be pressed with your fingers. Features like scientific calculator and unit converter are missing.

‘Notes’ are simple notes in which you can input text by the keyboard or by hand as an image. They can be synchronized with outlook. There also is a voice notice record option, but the quality of the sound is bad with a lot of background noises.

Search is an application searching in all files in the phone. You can specify certain types of files (calendar / contacts / excel / messaging / notes / etc), but the best option is All Data which will rummage everything in your phone.

File Explorer is the mobile alternative of Explorer in Windows environment with computers. We use it to view the phone memory, including the system folders of the device which feels like working on a PC.

Messaging:

Different message types are placed in a single menu - SMS, MMS and e-mails. There is nothing unexpected here. Entering text is done by one of the following touch display methods of the virtual keyboard:

We think that the on-screen keyboard is the fastest and most convenient way to do it, but if you train the other methods, they can also be quite handy! Combined with the T9 predictive system, entering text with the phone is really quick. Still, it must be done with the stylus, as the keys are very small in order to press them with fingers.

Just a few steps away are the options to add your e-mail account (POP3 or IMAP) and to use it on your mobile phone. Very nice extra is that the phone can try to get the email settings automatically from the internet, and so we configured our Gmail Account by entering only the username and password. Windows Mobile 6 already supports HTML formatted e-mails. The client is very similar to the Outlook on a computer, you can filter your inbox to see just some results, reply to message or forward it to other person.

The support for attachments allows you to download or send one, in addition to the text body. The phone can be set to synchronize with your company Exchange Server.

As standard, Windows Mobile comes preloaded with the mobile version of Live! Messenger (MSN). Windows Live account will be added in Messaging when you add your e-mail account. You can add third party application for other popular instant messengers like AIM, Yahoo! Chat and ICQ.

Connectivity:

LG KS20 is a tri-band GSM (900/1800/1900 MHz) and a single-band (2100 MHz) UMTS/HSDPA cell phone, and it can be used in the European and Asian 3G networks. Unfortunately the device can not be used everywhere in the US, because it doesn’t support the 850 MHz GSM band. On the other hand the appearance of a US version LG MS20/MS25 is expected, but there is no information on the release date.

Standard for a smartphone, WiFi and Bluetooth are available. Bluetooth is mainly used for connecting to other nearby devices, as accessories (earpieces, car-kits, multimedia devices) and for data transfer (transfer of files to/from another phone/PC). Cable connection can also be used, via the charger port.

Like all other Windows phones, you need to have ActiveSync installed on the computer to connect to it. The program will let you easily synchronize the phone (contacts, emails, organizer) with Outlook.

With WiFi you can connect to a wireless LAN network covering you, use it as an Internet source and view the shared documents (input \\name-of-computer in Internet Explorer and you will see what is shared).

Internet:

The mobile version of Internet Explorer is used for internet browsing; loading standard pages in full size is not a problem, because of the relatively high resolution (320x240 pixels) of such devices but you have to scroll horizontally as well as vertically almost all the time. If you want to read a text, it is almost sure you will not be able to fit the whole row in those 240 (or 320 if you put the phone in landscape mode) pixels. Full-screen usage is almost mandatory when the page has loaded.


There is also One Column View option which eliminates the need for horizontal scrolling but increases the need for vertical scrolling. The page is narrowed and thus it changes its initial look.

As it is a Pocket PC, you can always use third party software to replace the original one. We prefer using Microsoft Deepfish browser instead of Internet Explorer but unfortunately it is still in beta mode.

Camera:

The KS20 is equipped with a camera standard for a smartphone, not intended to be “the perfect” cameraphone – 2-megapixels with autofocus and LED flash. Starting it up you’ll have to wait approximately 3 seconds till the interface, which is in a landscape mode, loads. The settings icons are located in the top left side and on the right there is an indicator of the memory available, instead of showing the number of pictures remaining. The white balance setting bar is in the bottom part and there are two shortcuts – for changing the camera and its setting.
Focusing on an object takes about 3 seconds and taking the picture and saving it takes 5 additional seconds. The total of 8 seconds it takes between two frames is rather slow. The pictures are with an average for a 2 megapixel camera quality, with a good detail, but somewhat blurry when inspected at 100%. The colors are realistic, but not saturated enough, which makes the images look grayish and monotonous.



A camcorder is also present, with option to record in QVGA (320x240), QCIF (176x144) and Sub-QCIF (128x96) resolutions. The quality of the videos is very low, since the frame rate is very low too.

LG KS20 sample video at 320x240 pixels resolution

Multimedia:

The LG KS20 is equipped with the standard mobile version of Windows Media Player 10 which is a multimedia player for music and video files. The phone supports quite many music and video formats: MP3, AAC, AMR, WAV, MP4, WMV, 3GPP. After updating the library with files, all supported types are found, and they can be added to playlists. This function is not well implemented and organizing them is quite hard. Songs can be viewed by artist, album and genre, as these are taken from the ID3 tag of the files.


We recommend converting videos to MPEG4 using h.263 codec with a quality lower than 512kbps, otherwise the video will be skipping when in full-screen mode and there will be skipped frames.

You can’t really enjoy quality music with the new LG KS20, since it only has one small speaker, which if at maximum volume makes an awful sound. This could be expected from a phone which is not designed for music in the first place, so we switched on the earpieces of the set with the hope of making things better.

Luckily what we heard on through the earpieces was not that bad, but when at maximum the result wasn’t good. That’s why we recommend using the earpieces for wired handsfree mainly. In order to get a better sound, additional Bluetooth or wired stereo accessories can be used.

The KS20 has a FM radio with RDS, which uses the headphone' cable as an antenna for receiving signals. This function is pretty convenient, especially in moments when you’ve had enough of the music uploaded on the device.

Software:

The phone has a 128 MB RAM and 256 ROM Internal memory, which capacity can be extended through an additional microSD card. Regrettably the task manager is missing in the KS20 and in order to stop all the loaded applications at once you’ll have to use the standard one that comes with WM6 or you can download one from a third-party sources .

Windows Mobile for PPC provides unlimited capabilities for installing software and the only restrictions are the memory available and the hardware of the phone. The first problem is easily solved by getting a memory card as there are microSD cards with capacity of up to several GB. Every WM6 Professional phone comes with programs that are modified, “pocket” versions known PC applications. Such programs are the mobile versions of (Microsoft) Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Internet Explorer, Explorer, Media Player, etc. The Office applications allow you to view and edit documents of the most-used types and the phone opens them without any error. Even a complicated Excel document with a few sheets is not a problem. Unfortunately there is no PDF reader installed and you’ll have to download an additional application to use that format.

There are numerous programs created for this platform, almost as much as the ones intended for PCs with Windows operating system. The most popular are the various utilities for personalizing the PPC, multimedia players, file explorers, Instant Messengers, etc. You can download third party applications to be used instead of the preloaded ones.

We were very disappointed when we tried Skype. While having a conversation, the sound was breaking out at both ends of the line and we weren’t able to understand anything. This is due to the device being low on resources. Chatting was ok but that is not the purpose of the program. Despite the load we had no problems utilizing the other functions of the phone.

Definitely we are not pleased with the KS20’s system performance. It wasn’t rare when we had to wait the menus to load. Sometimes we event thought the phone has blocked, but after 30 seconds or so it just continued working. Using SPB Benchmark, it can also be noticed that the KS20 is slower than the similar in size HTC Touch and Eten X600.