Photos: Hands-on with the LG Viewty Smart

We flexed our shutter fingers to take a first look at the LG's new 8-megapixel touchscreen camera phone, the Viewty Smart, the follow-up to the LG Viewty

Flora Graham

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Flora Graham

June 1, 2009 5:22 a.m. PT

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In life, there's street smarts and there's book smarts. In mobile phones, there's smart phones and dumb phones. And then there's the LG Viewty Smart, which is neither. It's a touchscreen camera phone, like its predecessor, the Viewty. So just ignore the name, and focus on the goodies.

We finally got our hands on the Viewty Smart to see if it could tempt us to ditch our digital camera in favour of a photographer's phone.

The Viewty Smart has a 3-inch (76mm) touchscreen, zippy 7.2Mbps HDPA and Wi-Fi connectivity, GPS and 1.5GB of internal memory that can be expanded by up to 32GB using a microSD card.

There's also a music player with Dolby Mobile, which is supposed to make it sound "more spacious", a movie player that supports DivX and Xvid formats, and a TV output to watch it all on the big screen.

But that's all just gravy for a phone that's focused on photos. Click through to get a gander at this shiny snapper's specs.

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LG says it's put lots of work into making the Viewty Smart's camera interface easy to use, and we liked it -- options were easy to find and moving between stills and videos and between the camera and the gallery was straightforward.

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The Viewty Smart's camera has oodles of features, including 4x digital zoom, face detection, smile detection, digital image stabiliser, continuous shot and panorama mode. It also has a bundle of photo-editing features, from the useful ones like red-eye removal to the deeply ridiculous 'fog drawing'. In this mode, you blow on the microphone to make a fog-like blur appear over your photo, and then drag your finger around to clear bits of the image.

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There are also slow-motion and fast-motion video options, which can adjust the frame rate to capture Benny-Hill-style running about or a cinematic, slo-mo cry of "KHAAAN!"

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There's no lens cover over the Schneider-Kreuznach lens, so it's not protected from the spray of spit when you say Schneider-Kreuznach.

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The Viewty Smart feels thin at only 12.4mm thick, and there's a commendable lack of useless buttons on the front -- only one, to return you to the home screen. There's no 3.5mm headphone jack, though, which we hoped to see.