Toast rarely makes it into the headlines - a mundane yet underrated aspect of life, it largely goes unnoticed and uncelebrated. Until now, that is. Yesterday Simon over at Digital Lifestyles went over to the RCA to meet Freddie Yauner, inventor of a CO2-powered supertoaster, who broke the Guinness World Record for the world’s highest-popping toaster - an impressive 2.6m. Simon took along his LG Viewty and so managed to capture the toaster’s awesome popping power at 120fps - check out the video below:

The slices of toast quite clearly manage to go well above 2.6m, and in fact could well be in orbit around the Earth by now, so do keep an eye out for them!

Last week LG announced the ‘Viewtyful World’ online photo contest, which runs until 11th June. The eight-week contest is running in association with Yahoo, Flickr, Kelkoo, and National Geographic magazine which features some of the highest-quality photojournalism in the world.

The competition was devised to provide opportunities to explore the spaces surrounding our lives and rediscover the wonders and attractions of these worlds through photography.

You can enter the contest through the Viewty site on Flickr, you can also see others entries and vote for your favourites!

There are three Viewty phones on offer as weekly prizes - two of which will be decided by the online votes and the best photo will be selected by a renowned National Geographic photographer.

The grand winner - chosen from eight candidates selected through evaluation by National Geographic magazine - will have the honour of seeing his/her prize-winning work featured in a Viewty advertorial in National Geographic magazine and receive a copyright fee of US $10,000 for his or her work. Kerching!

For more information visit the Microsite.

It’s London Fashion Week and the beautiful and the stylish are flocking to London to fight for that impossible to get Moss/Westwood ‘comeback’ ticket. What could be a more fitting time to welcome the new ‘Dark Silver’ Viewty?

Yes, LG are now offering up the sleek silver edition LG Viewty in addition to the original black. LG researched colour preferences across Europe, and silver was selected as the number one colour choice of consumers looking for a stylish, polished, premium phone that reflects their own style.

But it’s not just a revamp don’t worry, the silver Viewty has all the functions and capabilities which made the original so popular, but with an improvement as well as a new look.

“The new ‘Dark Silver’ Viewty has all the quality of the black version but in addition to the stylish stand-out colour, we have re-designed the jog wheel to make scrolling the menus easier following consumer feedback. Viewty gives consumers the opportunity to own a phone that makes a statement, with a new high-tech finish that sleek, smart and complements its overall design,” said Dr. Skott Ahn, President and CEO of LG Electronics Mobile Communications Company. “We knew we had something special when we created Viewty, and it turns out that over half a million customers agree with us.”

There will be even more colour choices for the LG Viewty, with it’s 5.0 megapixel camera and a 3.0-inch touchscreen, available later this year.

The photo site Flickr is great for a number of reasons - one of them being you can see what other’s photos have been taken with the LG Viewty, showing off its abilities.

This, for example, is a classy winter shot of ice on a tree branch:

21. Dezember 2007 by ernscht

The camera fares well indoors as well, as shown by this macro shot:

Xbox 360 Controller by Skyfall

And the indoor shots are proven with this dinky shot of a scale model:

New Rotterdam Central by jacco.org

I found all these photos and more at Flickr’s photos tagged with “Viewty”. There’s also a clutch of Viewty phone owners’ groups there - LG Viewty, Viewty KU 990 and Viewtyful. If you have a Viewty, join up and we’ll keep an eye out for your photos.

Time for another check in with our fellow bloggers to find out what they’ve been saying about their Viewtys.

(We might have to stop doing these soon – we don’t want all the praise going to our heads and making us smug!)

Simon at Zath Games got in touch to let us know he’d written his review and it seems he is also a fan:

“the first thing that you’ll notice about the LG Viewty is just how great this mobile phone actually looks and feels in your hand – it sits nicely in the hand, not being too big or heavy”

Particularly of the camera (a common theme now!)

“The camera that comes on the LG Viewty is one of the best that I’ve seen on a mobile phone boasting an impressive 5 megapixels of detail for your photos. It has good quality flash (the first camera I’ve actually owned to have one – smartphones don’t tend to have this feature)”
…
“with the LG Viewty KU990, you’ve basically got a great digital camera with built-in phone functionality!”

The team at Know Your Mobile were almost too kind in their review of “the 5 megapixel, HSDPA and touchscreen wonder phone”

Oh you guys..

“it matches many of the iPhone’s specs and in many cases exceeds them.”
…
“the Viewty is a definite step up from the Prada not just in terms of its feature set but also its build quality. The phone packs a bit of heft with its dimensions of 104mm by 55mm by 17mm and its 112 gramme weight. But it’s a nice, solid and expensive-feeling heft”
…
“our first impressions of the LG Viewty are that it seems like an excellent mobile phone that has been saddled with user interface that is potentially superb but still has some bugs to be ironed out.”

They go on, but we wouldn’t want to brag…

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.

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.

Another revolutionary aspect of the Viewty is the possible ISO light sensitivity setting of 800. Whilst normal digital cameras regularly have an ISO 800 setting (and above) it is unusual for a camera phone to have such a high setting. Such a (relatively) high rating will allow you take better pictures in darkened conditions and addresses a common complaint with camera phones generally – that they don’t work well in low light. The Viewty also includes Smart Light technology ensuring better and brighter images indoors and at night.

The fun video shows the relative difference in light sensitivity between ISO settings by recreating Van Gogh’s Starry Starry Night with 30,000 post-it notes. Keep your eye on the bottom right hand corner to see the ISO setting increase along with the light.

Comparisons with a standard digital camera have been excellent, Dial-a-Phone is certainly impressed with the Viewty’s capabilities, and you can see the results of our own low light test here.