Review of the LG Renoir
LG's latest triumph, the Renoir (also known as the KC910), sizes up at 107.8 x 55.9 x 14 mm with a weight of 114g, the display is TFT Touchscreen (256k colours) and it has a flash based user interface. The screen is a fairly impressive 3" and boasts 240x400 pixels making it the biggest and clearest in comparison to some of its main competitors such as the Sony Ericsson C905 and Samsung i8510.
Now personally, I'm not a huge fan of touchscreen phones however I was given the chance to test drive this 8 megapixel giant so I thought I should give it a fair trial and on first impression I have to admit that I was rather impressed with the look and build of it. Make no doubt about it the phone is rather big however; it is also quite light and fits nicely in the palm of your hand whilst you navigate with the other.
My biggest issue with touchscreens is that I've always thought that my fingers are too big to be prodding around on the screen, before this, the thought of texting on one was actually quite daunting and when there was no stylus to be found I only thought the worst, however I honestly could not fault it after giving it a lengthy series of tests. Once I started to play around with the phone, nothing could be easier. The menu's are set out in such a way that you cannot confuse one thing with the other, and they are large enough for anyone's fingers, therefore navigating my way round the phone was a breeze, even the camera features which included large easy to use icons, drop down menu's and my personal favourite, a sliding image gallery whereby if you put your finger on the screen and just slide to either the left or right it will take you to the next or previous image/video.
All that being said, the key attraction and selling point for the KC910, has to be it's 8 megapixel camera which includes automatic and manual focus, image stabiliser and a range of face detection features which did come in use when I was outside taking a few example photos as it was quite a windy day but still it managed to capture images instantly with perfect clarity. The images, which can be found on the mobiles.co.uk blog were amazing. It captured different lights and colours perfectly and I couldn't believe how much detail the phone manages to squeeze into the image. Granted it was a bright day so everything was in the phones favour but the contrast in colours were amazing, it's by far the best camera phone I have ever seen. It is also equipped with a Xenon flash which is much brighter than the standard LED flash found on most phones and on top of that, the KC910 uses its built-in GPS to geo-tag photographs automatically. The KC910 also excels in the video department recording at 30 frames per second and slow motion 120 fps QVGA videos are also available.
Additionally it has built-in GPS receiver including GPS functions, TV out functionality, Java MIDP 2.0, WAP and WI-FI connections, Bluetooth 2.0 so you can listen to music via a Bluetooth headset (something I wanted to try but never got the chance to) and to top it all off it has HSDPA 7.2 mbps internet capabilities for ultra fast browsing and downloading.
As far as touchscreen mobile phones go, I genuinely can't find a big enough fault to make me not want to buy this phone instantly. It has a very responsive screen, that even I used with minimal fuss, easy to operate menus throughout the handset, whether you're just changing basic settings, playing a game, or evening chopping and changing music tracks and playlists and not to be forgetting, it has one hell of a camera that wouldn't look out of place next to your everyday digital camera. In fact I can't praise it enough.
Jack, Mobiles.co.uk
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