LG KG920 review

There are people who want a mobile phone just to make and receive calls and nothing more, and we understand that.

But there are also those who want a mobile phone to do everything: play music; take photos and movies; act like a PDA and more besides, and we understand that too. But LG has managed to spectacularly miss both these markets with the KG920.

Crowbarring in as many features as possible and making them immediately accessible from the front of the phone is all very laudable, but the practical upshot of this approach is that this handset feels like it was stitched together by a technological Dr Frankenstein.

Just look at the size of the keypad. Unless you're actually in primary school, those are tiny buttons indeed. It didn't help that on our review model, Cyrillic characters were squeezed onto the keys as well as the Roman alphabet we know - you'd better be the tiny-fingered texting equivalent of a touch-typist.

The headline feature is obviously the 5-megapixel camera, but it's very disappointing. And we're not just talking about the quality of the pictures - which as you'd expect when trying to cram so many receptors into a small area, are fuzzy and noisy - but the whole experience of trying to use it.

Sliding open the lens cap has no effect. From idle, if you want to take a photo, you have to press the power key, press one of the volume keys twice to unlock the phone, hold down the shutter, wait for the camera to start up behind a splash screen, then focus and take your shot. It's far too slow and is very difficult to focus properly.

Menu systems are oddly structured, navigation is a pain thanks to the fiddly five-way pad and the soft buttons being positioned an inch from their on-screen command. The battery life isn't stellar either. Unless someone pays you to take it, steer well clear of this less than impressive phone.

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