Time for round two of our look at what bloggers have been saying about their Viewty’s. Everton from Connected Internet is certainly impressed with the phones features, particularly the camera.

The LG Viewty sets new standards for cameraphones by including a manual focus function, a first for a cameraphone. It also includes an image stabiliser that helps record clearer images. I shot a few shots with the camera in the States and compared them to my 7 megapixel digital camera and they were comparable.

Great praise indeed. At the end of the day Everton sees the Viewty as,

good phone that doubles as an excellent camera, rather than trying to pack the Viewty with lots of gimmicky features such as GPS

The Viewty is very much a camera orientated phone and I think everyone can agree it’s excellent in that department. However, it’s also worth mentioning that it comes with 3G/HSDPA connectivity for touch screen web browsing so it certainly has other high spec features.

So if you’re struggling to find techie present for Christmas, Everton has a suggestion,

“The Viewty is a master cameraphone without peers at the moment, and would definitely be a nice present from Santa this year.”

Secondly, James at The Mighty Gadget gave the Viewty a review and was overall also impressed with the phone. He picked up on a few minor details of the phone that might be of interest to some.

He was impressed with both the on screen keyboard and the email functionality the Viewty provided.

I was impressed with the email though; it was quite fast thanks to the HSDPA (3.5G) and was easy to read through thanks to the scrolling system.

He also noted that the loudspeaker function was “excellent”.

Riyaz’s conclusion I think sums up nicely the phone and its features.

I am a geek so I typically chose function over form and go for Symbian/WM based phones. However this phone has impressed me, it does all the functions I require out of a phone and it does them well. It is also a very good looking phone so will keep even the most style conscious person happy.

We’re really happy with the reactions to the Viewty so far. It seems that Europe as a whole is equally enamoured as we’ve sold 310,000 handsets, or about 6,300 day, since launch.

Gizmodo have reported on a neat little Bluetooth USB dongle from Kodak and Belkin for transferring photos from your phone to your PC.

Nothing that spectacular so far but Belkin claims to have made transferring photos onto your computer even easier than it was before – which is no mean feat given how easy it is already.

So, how have they achieved this?

1. Whenever you’re in range of the dongle it will automatically transfer your photos onto your PC.
2. It will then upload them straight onto Facebook or Myspace.

So perhaps not hugely innovative in itself, but the thought of waking up from a night out and all your pictures have already been uploaded onto Facebook without you touching a button? Sounds good to me.

A lot of blogs are reviewing the Viewty, and we thought it a good idea to help reviews be as informative and pretty as possible. So, here are some resources for anyone who wants to blog about the phone - feel free to download & use to your heart’ content.

Product shots

Touchscreen (off)	Touchscreen (on)	Front & screen
Front (angled)	Front (straight)	Fancy prism shot

Logos

Viewty logo (black)	Viewty logo (white)
LG logo (white)	LG logo (black)

Video

There are videos of the Viewty available on our Viewty YouTube channel - including demos of the handwriting recognition, manual focus and high-speed shooting, as well as the current TV advert for the Viewty.

Product Information

More information about the product can be obtained from the following files (all in PDF format):

• Press release
• Reviewer’s guide (with technical specifications)

We hope anyone reviewing or talking about the Viewty finds this useful. Enjoy!

The Viewty has been out for a few weeks now and it’s been really pleasing to see some of the opinions we have got from people who we asked to review for us. Mark at Phones Review was positively glowing in his review, falling in love with the camera - at times we were blushing at how he found the phone:

Can I actually find anything wrong with this mobile phone? The answer so far is a big fat “NO”.

Moving on and last of all for this review at least is the camera and video which will have a more in depth review pretty soon, but briefly and for now must say the camera is just amazing, crystal clear images and so many options in the camera menu. The video is just as impressive especially the 120 fps bit which takes recordings and plays them back in slow motion.

Another Mark, at Tracy and Matt, has an “LG Viewty reviewty” was more equivocal in his opinion.

To review this device though, I have to look at the day to day use of it. I have been lucky enough to have used the Viewty for quite a while, and I’m really impressed with the simple usability and stability of it. From the simple, if scary, unlock button to the onscreen qwerty keyboard in landscape mode.

Mark was a little concerned about the speed of his phone, saying it takes up to 15 seconds to view a photo taken. This is certainly not the case on my Viewty, where it’s more like 1 second for a 5 Megapixel image from the internal memory, and maybe 2 for one from an external SD Card - as shown on this quick little video I’ve just made. No one else we know has picked up on this either so it looks like Mark may have had some exceptional fault with his model or his memory card.

Microsoft tech blogger Steve Clayton is also quite impressed by the Viewty with the odd caveat:

When in camera mode all the settings and controls are access by simply by tapping once on the screen with your fingertip or thumb. Pretty cool and simple access to photo settings, zoom and flash. The location of the shutter button is perfect too and I’d quite happily snap a lot of photos with this camera phone. It has an image stabilisation dedicated button and also has video recording and playback of course - with the video capture speed of 120fps being particularly impressive. Photo viewing is very nice with a Surface like application that lets you scatter photos across the screen and double tap to view the photo itself or single tap for photo details.

Steve notes that the Viewty doesn’t sync with Microsoft Outlook - this is only true for Microsoft Outlook 2007; all versions previous to it sync fine with the Viewty and we’re looking into getting it compatible with the latest versions of Outlook as soon as possible.

Dial-a-phone have done a testing session with the 5MP camera phones currently on the market – of which the Viewty is one. They’ve done three separate photographic tests of the camera’s capabilities and presented them for an easy comparison.

I’m pleased to report the Viewty comes out really well in the comparison and from this evidence looks to be consistently in the top 2 along with the Samsung G800. We have a lot of faith in the Viewty’s camera and its good to see this demonstrated in a direct comparison test.

We’re also very happy with the poll dial-a-phone have on their post. As of today the Viewty has received 72 % of the vote in the ‘which camera phone is the best’ category, which is excellent news given the strength of the competition.

You can see the results of our own comparison between the Viewty and a standard 5MP digital camera here.

We’d certainly be keen to hear of any other tests involving the Viewty to see how well the camera performs.