LG Shine KE970

Author's product rating:   

Look & Feel	Satisfactory
Durability & Robustness	Strong
Battery standby time	Poor
Value for money	Good
Range of features	Large selection

Advantages:	Grt stylish design .
Disadvantages:	Costly

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

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LG KE970 Shine
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LG are at it again coming to us with another incredible mobile phone, which is quite astonishing. The new LG KE970 Shine is the first of the shiny devices from the Korean manufacturer. It really does have some serious horsepower in this thing and is one of the most advanced GSM handsets by LG and quite obviously from the images below the most attractive. The phone comes with a huge amount of features from the 2 mega pixel camera with auto focus right the way don to the microsd memory card. This is most defiantly going to grab the attention of even the best mobile users.

Below are some of the key features that this phone presents us with:

- Stylish all metal design with a mirror finish display
- QVGA display resolution
- 2 mega pixel auto focus camera with Schneider-Kreuznach lens
- Scroller navigation
- MicroSD memory card slot
- Office documents viewer

LG has always managed to make phones looking good and stylish for example the appearance of the LG Chocolate had a huge impact on the world of mobile technology. The manufacturers have tried to make this phone better than ever by enhancing the functions on the phone and also making the phone look more stylish and fashionable then ever before. The LG KE970 Shine really managed to shine in my hands as it is the best phone that I have ever had and I could not wait to get going and test it as it has huge capabilities.

So let’s start with how I came to receive this phone. I have a habit of looking for bargains on e-Bay and I have purchased a huge amount of things off their and I find that this is always the cheapest place to get all of the new and upcoming things. Although it isn’t the day that the manufacturers release the product it is not long before you can find them plastered all over the website meaning that there is a great chance that you will be able to get one. Well once I had won the item I really wanted it to just appear but I had to wait for it to get to me before I could start playing with my new phone show it off to everyone that I know. When I eventually received the product it was brand new and come in the original LG KE970 packaging and it is very well packed. It is almost the same packaging as the LG Chocolate with a slight alteration to the colours that are used on the box. Upon opening the box I found my astonishing looking phone, data cable, LG headset and a Memory card.

What I really don’t understand is that phones are always becoming smaller and smaller but yet they still mange to have more and more functions. It doesn’t make sense to me but why am I complaining. The LG KE970 is certainly not a big phone and measures in at 99.8 x 50.6 x 13.8 mm but it does have quite a lot of weight which is due to its metal body and construction, this is what makes the phone weigh in at 119g. Although that seems very heavy for a phone it actually doesn’t fell all that heavy and you don’t seem to notice and to me it gives me the feeling that I could throw the phone against the wall or stamp on it and it still wouldn’t break. I’m only joking really but the phone does feel like it has a real solid strength which you would not find in many phones these days, especially the Samsung slide phones.

After looking at the design of the phone I was trying to decide who the mobile was actually aimed at as it was quite a neutral kind of thing, so to speak. The good solid metal gave me the kind of feel that it was aimed for the male sex but then the front of the mobile has a mirror effect meaning that it could quite easily be aimed at the females as they have an obsession with hair etc, you get the point. But personally I think that the phone is aimed at both sexes and will be a huge success in the phone market.

From looking at the phone and investigating all of its features I have found out that the whole of the top panel does not have any functionality unless you count the loudspeaker which is used for incoming calls and playing music etc. With technology trying to become better and better LG have opted to try on of the older features again to see if they can resurrect it but I don’t think that this is going to happen anytime in the near future at it was a real bad piece of engineering. The main piece being the scroll function and quite frankly it really isn’t going to work in the world today. The central piece is the navigation scroller which doesn’t actually work that well and leaves the user quite astounded as I was. I expected much more from it. The fact that when I wanted to scroll through a menu and it wasn’t scrolling one bit. I found that I had to turn the scroller about 2 revolutions for it to even go down one item on the list which I thought was quite atrocious. By the time that I was halfway down the menu my thumb was aching like mad, not only does it take a very long time to get through the menu sometimes it decides to spontaneously move down a few of the items in the menu at once, which got me confused quite a few times.

At each end of the scroll button there are two more keys which on first inspection I did not even notice that they was their. It was only upon looking at the instruction manual that I discovered that they was there. Once I had looked at the keys and experimented with them I found that they were so that you could move sideways through a document or picture etc. But these buttons are easily missed and are quite small which makes them a bit harder to use than the other buttons. Surrounding the scroller and these two extra sideways scrolling buttons is two more buttons which are made entirely made of metal and go with the design well. These are the main selection keys for going back to previous menus etc. Unlike the other buttons these are very easy to use and have a flowing look to them. As for the designs of the right hand side, bottom and top of the phone you will find that there is not much going on at all. There are no functions or buttons on any of these sides unless you count the little hole at the top where you can connect a chain or a phone charm etc.

On the other hand the left hand side of the phone is a lot more interesting where it houses several buttons and sections etc. it has slots for charger/headset port, two volume keys, the MP3 shortcut key and the camera shutter key. All of these are pretty much self explanatory but there are a few things that are not so obvious such as that although the MP3 shortcut button is used to pen the player it is also used to minimise it whilst it is in use which is a little nice handy function. Now turning the handset over you will see that this is not quite as shiny as the front but it still looks very stylish. The finish to the back of the phone is a sort of brushed effect and makes the phone look quite good. The brushed panel covers all of the back of the phone and upon removal of this you will be confronted with the slot for the sim card and also a 750mAh Li-Ion battery which is quite small. There was a disappointment that I found with the phone and it was the battery life as it only just managed to last a day when I wasn’t using it that much. I dread to think what it would be like if I used the quite often throughout the day, I’m pretty sure it would die in a very few hours.

As for the design of this phone it is very good apart from the minor issues that I had with the scroll function and the battery life, but all in all I would rate the phone 8/10 for the design. The thing that impressed me most was the mirror finish on the front of the phone I thought that this was a very good technique for making the phone look good and attract all ends of the audience.

Well moving on to the usability of the phone I have discovered that its many functions and ability to use was very good and I was more than happy. The phone has a remarkable screen that allows for you to use the phone wherever you want for example you can use it in direct sunlight and still see the screen perfectly. I was quite astonished that this was capable as every other phone that I have owned I have had to cradle it whilst texting etc as I could not see the screen. The resolution of the phone is QVGA and this is pretty good and all of the images and videos etc on the phone look very good upon viewing them. There are certain things that you are able to change whilst you are using the phone that would make the display look better for example the brightness of the screen, this can be configured by the user but it is advised that you stick to the preset settings whilst using the phone unless you actually know what you are doing.

Moving on swiftly to the keypad I found that this was very good and easy to use that is not mentioning the scroll section just concentrating on the alphanumeric part. For those who do not know that is buttons that have both the functions of numbers and letters. When trying to send a message on the phone it was quite hard to get used to typing because all of the keys run smoothly and made it quite hard to actually tell whether you had moved your thumb onto another key. With all of the other phones that I have owned I have been able to text without looking at the one, done by entirely the feel of the keys and knowing where each of the letters are. This is the one thing that I was not able to do on this phone and I have still not quite got the hang of doing this but I have got better now that I have sent a fair amount of messages. But yet again there is another slight downfall and that is that all of the keys that appeared on the top row were quite hard to access as they are with most slide phones but this was especially hard to access some of the keys.

As for the speaker which is used for all of the different sounds from the phone, it plays the music which is quite load and since it is the same speaker that is used when you receive a call you will find that the volume of the call is also quite high which results in you being able to take calls when you are in the busiest and loudest of places and still being able to hear you caller perfectly.

On the home screen as I like to call it, it shows all of the relevant information that you need to know on a first glance of the phone for example the battery life, signal strength. There is also a function that is quite good where you can turn off the carriers name. This is the operators name for example orange etc and this can be removed from the screen which is quite a neat little extra as it can sometimes spoil the look on the display when it has orange or something of the sort plastered on it. As I was saying before the two keys at the surrounding the scroll bar are used for the “contacts” menu and also the “menu” menu. The main menu has quite a good look to it and it is arranged in a 3 x 3 square grid of icons which are shown as small images. When you hover over the icon that you are wishing to select you see that the image then becomes animated and these animations look quite good.

As with most of the phones that have lots of items in their menus all of the submenus have a number assigned to them. This is so that you can just click the menu button and then press a number straight afterwards and it allows you to advance through the hones menus faster than if you were to manually select them. You are then able to customize the buttons further by adding your own shortcut keys to them, for example if you were to use the scroll bar down then you could have it so that the message inbox opens etc. I thought that this was a good idea and I have changed all four of the buttons so that it is very easy for me to use my phone and I also find that it is a lot faster to use the phone as well. As for the look of the main menu, you are able to change this as well so that it is viewed as a list, this is sometimes easier to view the menu like this but I find that the grid menu is a huge amount better than the lists as it is a lot easier to see the items that are in the main menu etc.

With this phone I have found that it does a function that lots of phone manufacturers are deciding to do these days and that is customizing the way that the screen looks when you are dialling a number etc. you are able to change this so that it suits your style or mood etc. there are several different options for you to choose from, one which looks like a multi coloured calculator, another which looks like a notepad, another that looks like balls from the lottery and there are also a few others which you will have to find out about if you purchase this phone.

The phonebook for the LG KE970 has also been enhanced as you are now able to store up to 1000 contacts in the phone which is a huge amount, I don’t think there is anyone who has that many friend or that many numbers that need to be stored into their phone. For each contact you are able to store 4 numbers which are mobile, home, office, fax and you are also able to store an email address. As with moist of the phones these days you are able to place them in different groups, assign pictures to numbers and groups and also add notes to the contacts. With the ability to add an image to the contact there are some slight limitations, these are that the image has to be a .jpg image and it also has to have a resolution of 540x480 pixels. Its really good being able to scroll through your contacts and seeing all of the different images but it also covers parts of the contact names and sometimes can be inconvenient. Sort of the same function as the images assigned to the contacts, you can also assign a ring tone to each contact if you wish to. This can be useful because if you have a good memory then you can know who is calling you without looking at your phone.

Well now for a little section on something that I like to call “call management”, this is where all of the things such as your missed calls, received calls, call time etc is stored and you are able to view them. All of the different things can be seen in general from the menu screen or you can select the relevant contact and see things such as the time and date etc.

So swiftly moving on to the thing that I use most and the thing that most people use most. Wow that was a lot of “most”. Anyway that would be sending messages from the phone. There is several different kind of messages that you can send, these are SMS, MMS, email message and Bluetooth message. The Bluetooth message is a whole new context for the LG mobiles this can be used to send messages to other devices that may be close by but maybe in a different room etc or it could be sending a message to a computer for some particular reason. But the main messages are SMS, this is short for Short Message System. This is really sending normal text messages at the cost of the network provider. There is a great function about sending messages and that is that if you are writing a message and for some reason you have to stop writing it and do something else on the phone, the phone automatically saves the message so that you can continue when you open up the new message screen again. This is a good new feature as you are able to carry on from where you left off etc. As an extra added bonus the phone keeps a record of all of the people whom you have recently sent a message to and therefore shows a list of them so that you can choose from them if you would like to, this saves you from looking through the whole phonebook to send a message.

Well what about the email then, the email client supports POP3, IMAP4 and SMTP protocols and it is very good at using these to send and receive emails as I have tried it just to make sure that it works as I would not normally send emails, from the phone anyway. There are also a few limitations with the email as well and that is the fact that if you are sending or downloading an attachment then it has a size restriction which is 300KB which is rather small considering the files that some people send from client to client. The second restriction is that if you have received an email which has more than 5 attachments you will only be able to download and view 5 of them, this is not really a very good feature as you should be able to send and receive as much as you want. And finally there is another restriction which is that you are only able to store 50 messages for each of the accounts.

Here’s something that we all want on a phone and we always want lots of it, the memory. The integrated memory on this phone is not a considerable amount but the phone does support the use of microSD memory cards which allow for more memory which may store all of the music or pictures that you may want to store on your phone. The integrated memory has a capacity of 5oMB or so it says, with all of the space that is reserved for messages and other things you end up with only having 48MB for the memory card. When you are looking for all of the images and music that is sorted on you phone when on the main menu the file manager option is the one that is called my stuff. It then shows all of your multimedia in separate folders which is done by the type of the file. There are a variety of functions that you can use when arranging the files in these folders and when you want to send things, this is a function called marking. All of the files that you would like to send to a particular device you will have to mark. This is very easy and effective if you want to send many files at once, this function even works across multiple folders.

The good thing about viewing images on this phone is that you have the option to make the image the size of the screen which is quite a lot bigger than if you were just viewing them normally. Although the images are quite a lot bigger you will still find that the quality of the image stays very good, that’s considering that you have took the image on a good quality camera. With the data cable that has been provided with this phone you are able to send and receive data via the cable from a computer. This is relatively easy and therefore very quick. There are also Bluetooth adapters that you can buy from good computer stores where you can send data from you computer to the phone and vice versa by the use of Bluetooth etc.

Using your phone is one of the most common things that people do these days and I must admit I am one of those people. I like to play my music whilst walking around etc and this has been made easy by the use of a music player on the phone. The nice little feature that I have recently discovered is that you can create your own play lists so that only the songs you choose play. I thought that it was a nice little feature to add to a phone of this standard. There is a drawback to the music player and that is that you can not sort out all of you r music by the artist or title of the song but only by the track name. That is where the music player falls apart as some of the filenames may not be the actually names pf the songs and therefore it becomes very hard to find all of the songs that you would like to listen to. This is where I found that the play list function comes in very handy as every week or so I make a new play list with all of the latest good songs that I have acquired. And to top it all of the music player can play music whilst you are doing other tasks for example if you would like to send a text whilst listening to your music then feel free to do so as the music will carry on playing until you hit the stop button. There are a few interactive things that you are able to change about the music player and they include the equaliser, here you are able to change how much bass you have etc. this is all very good but I have noticed that even when I have the bass on full there does not seem to be much bass in the actually phone and it does not sound tremendously good but when you listen to the music through the headphones that are also provided then the sound totally changes and you get the proper music that you should be listening to.

Now for the camera, another much needed function for a phone of today’s technology. I though that the camera was quite good but then after actually reviewing It I was brought to a different conclusion. The time that it actually takes to take a picture is about 9 seconds which is a long time to be holding a camera when you are taking a picture. The quality is quite good for a phone but I have since changed my mind because I have heard about the release pf phones that have a 5 mega pixel camera, which is astounding considering that it is a phone we are talking about here. There a few different modes that the camera can run in and when coming to use your camera in the dark you can use the flash although will find that there is no night mode on the camera which is quite a disappointment. As with the music player there are several different things that you are able to change when using the camera for example the brightness, resolution the colour effect on the image that you are taking. Some of the effects that are on the camera are things such as sepia, black and white, negative etc. There is also a function that is available on most of the Samsung range now and this is where you are able to make a mosaic of images you have the option to take 1, 4 or 9 images and make a mosaic of them. Also there is a function which takes 3 or 6 images successively and basically shows the movement of an object etc.

All of the images that I have taken with this phone have turned out very good with the slight exception of the ones I took of the sun, only joking. But yeah all of the images are good and allow for small file sizes when saving. The camera is also used for the video recording section of the phone which is also very good quality and has a maximum resolution of 176 x 144 pixels and the file extensions is usually .3gp. the menus leading up to the video are pretty much the same as they are for the still mode camera but there are a few exceptions such as the option to change the recording time, whether it be limited or unlimited recording time.

There are 2 ways at which I have connected the phone to my computer and they are the data cable that comes with the phone and the Bluetooth adapter that needs to be purchased elsewhere. The speed at which the data is transferred using the data cable is really quite slow and needs to be improved if they want people to use this function properly, but when using this you phone appears in the windows explorer showing it as a removable disk drive which is really quite handy as there is now no software that needs to be installed. The second method is a slightly slower as it involves the Bluetooth connection which is not as secure and therefore it takes a slightly longer time to transfer data.

Now for the thing that is becoming more and more popular as time goes by and technology gets better and that is getting the internet on you mobile phone. It now loads up all types of web pages and loads them quite quickly. When using the internet I had full access to the internet and it was just like using the internet on a computer except that it took a little longer navigate around the pages etc, but you get the idea. There is then all of the other applications that are on even the oldest of mobile phones such as the calendar, calculator, alarm clock, unit converter and java games etc only these have been slightly enhanced for this LG KE970 Shine.

The reception quality is a real good thing that everybody wants to know about these days and to me it seems that the reception is always good and I have not had a problem with it so far, all calls are clear and of good quality.

So overall the phone is very good and has become on of the best phones that LG have produced so far as it has high standards of technology as well as the high standards of style which make the phone even better. There are many good and bad things about the phone that need to be addressed before this phone would make a real difference in the market but overall the phone is quite good.

Well I have been using the phone for a few weeks and I have come to the conclusion that it is a very good phone and I have not had any technical problems so far. For the design of the phone I would rate it 10/10 and for the features on the phone I would rate it 8/10 and for the functionality I rate it 7/10. The phone can be purchased at most good phone stores and can also be purchased on the internet for a cheaper price as I did. The price that I have found this product to be on the phone market is around £150.00

So to conclude about the LG KE970 Shine, it is a great phone with excellent capabilities and overall I give it a rating 8/10 because of its excellent design and also because of the new functionalities that it has.

Thank you for reading this review and I hope to be hearing from you soon.