Worldwide, mobile users are aspiring for better quality images to capture life's special moments, and LG has surely responded to the market needs by launching the Viewty. The Viewty has been seen as a much-awaited product from LG, and its technological edge and style factor will be well appreciated in the Indian market too.

The LG Viewty KU990 is a splendid looking phone. The glossy front and the chrome border lining make it even more appealing to the eye. The glossy side surprisingly does not attract too many fingerprints. This attractive and delicate handset is actually quite solid.

A 3-inch screen largely dominates the face of the phone. However, the eye-catching feature of the Viewty has to be its camera. With a 5 mega pixel auto focus camera with Xenon flash, the camera is simply fascinating. The camera lens is a Schneider Kreuznach. This lens provides for distinct clarity and the Xenon flash captures the visuals so beautifully, that you will never miss a camera again. In fact, the rear of the Viewty has an uncanny resemblance to a digital camera.

The module has auto and manual focus options. The auto mode is less time consuming, though the manual focus can, at times, provide better results. The Viewty's digital Image Stabilisation will work wonders for those shaky pictures that you would click.

The Viewty has four modes to capture images - Normal, Frame, a Panorama mode and a Continuous mode. The panorama mode helps you capture three images, which are digitally sewn together to give rise to an extra wide-angle shot. The continuous mode takes nine shots with a single click. That works out to a shot every third of a second. An impressive feature, considering that it is only a camera phone. Unfortunately, you can save only one shot from the nine shots captured.

The other modes offered by the camera are Portrait, Night, Landscape, Beach, Sport, and Party. The phone also includes a full MP3 Player and a YouTube upload and viewing utility, which works well over 3G. Similar to the iPhone's browser, you can view full sized web pages at a reduced size, and then zoom in on the sections you want to view properly.

The Viewty does not have a physical keypad. The only keys on the phone are the green and red for Call, and End respectively, and a Cancel key. When you need to dial a number, a virtual keypad appears on the screen. If you want to type a message, a QWERTY keyboard is at your disposal. Another option to write text is the handwriting recognition software. The touch screen is evenly reactive with a finger as it is with the stylus. The touch screen is Haptics-enabled, which implies that every press is recognised by a gentle vibration.

The Viewty supports both POP3 and IMAP4 protocols for email, with a maximum attachment size of 400KB. You can set your phone to auto retrieve your new emails at a preset time interval. Viewty has 100MB internal memory and a microSD memory card slot.

The LG Viewty also features an MP3 player that filters tracks by artist, album, genre, playlist, recently played etc. The handset has a Flight mode. The phone has FM radio and RDS support.

It also has a very good web browser. Browsing in landscape view is an enjoyable experience. A small map and tabbed browsing makes it even more convenient.

Below is a snapshot of the features of the LG KU990 Viewty: