LG's Viewty KU990 offers high-end performance

The KU990 does not come with a physical keyboard because its touchscreen has a virtual keyboard.

The touchscreen measures 3 inches diagonally and is capable of displaying 240 x 400 pixels in 256,000 colours.

The screen is very responsive and works effectively for controlling a lot of phone and multimedia functions.

With its large screen, no keyboard and 103.5 x 54.4 x 14.8mm size, the KU990 looks more like a slim compact digital camera. However, its photo quality definitely cannot compare with that of real cameras.

It can be used for taking snapshots just for fun for small-size viewing, but when viewing the photos closely in real size, artefacts or visual noise can clearly be seen.

A nice thing about the KU990 is that it can shoot video in VGA resolution up to 30 frames per second and has the ability to upload video directly to YouTube. The KU990 comes with a hefty 100 megabytes of internal memory for storing multimedia files, like digital photos, music and movies in the compressed DivX format. The memory can be expanded with a 2-GB microSD card.

Its companion software comes with a utility for you to turn your DVD movie into DivX format, suitable to watch on the go on the KU990's bright screen. The KU990's proprietary Web browser is also very good. It allows you to view full-sized Web pages at a reduced size and then zoom in on the sections you want to see properly. Our test also found that the device's voice quality was very good.

The LG Viewty KU990 can operate on 3G and the GSM 900, GSM 1800 and GSM 1900 networks.

It has a suggested retail price of Bt17,900.

The Nation