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.