LG KGP202 on Orange PAYG
March 22, 2010 by admin
Filed under Uncategorized
LG makes some amazingly inventive mobile phones. Just a couple of weeks ago I had my hands on the Prada KE850 with its innovative touchscreen, and before that I’d reviewed the fancy thin slider the Shine KE970 while late last year LG brought forth its rather strangely branded but again innovative Chocolate KG800.
The company doesn’t only do this kind of high end handset though. It also has a foothold at the less flashy end of the market, and the KP202 is an example. My review sample came from Orange where it is only a Pay As You Go handset and will cost you £49.99.
This is a Tri-band mobile with GPRS and is a small format flip phone with inner and outer screens. It feels rather nice in the hand thanks to its rounded shaping, and it should slot nicely into most pockets being just 87mm tall, 45mm wide and 19.8mm thick. When the flip is opened it extends to about 158mm tall and it feels quite comfortable to hold to the ear during voice calls.
LG has kept the weight down to 78g. That is pretty much down to the fact that this phone is made entirely of plastic. Its colour scheme is not unappealing with a mostly black front fascia with grey frame and some silver trimmings. The remainder of the handset – sides, back and insides – mixes two tones of grey. The black area on the front of the fascia is nicely shiny, though it does attract greasy fingerprints and I suspect it might be susceptible to scratching.
The front screen is rather basic in that it is a monochrome STN. Its 96 x 64 pixels make it pretty small by today’s standards. But it does manage to display plenty of information. The time is writ large, the date smaller. Your network is emblazoned there too (why – might you forget?), along with battery and signal strength indicators, and a symbol telling you what profile is in use.
Get a voice message and the symbol for that is popped onto the front screen too. The screen dims after a few seconds and goes off completely after a few more but can be called into action again if you press the volume rocker on the left edge of the handset.There is a camera on board and I’ll get to that in more detail later. For now, though, I’ll just note that you can associate a photo with a contact. If the phone is opened when they call the photo displays on the main inner screen. If the phone is closed the front screen just displays your contact’s name as it is not up to showing photos.
The main screen is pretty disappointing. It is a 128 x 160 pixel TFT displaying 65 thousand colours in an area measuring 1.8in corner to corner. With most modern handsets sporting screens with 240 x 320 pixels, LG has definitely compromised in this area.On the other hand the keypad is smashing in terms of usability. The keys are large and the design feature which means the central column of keys are semicircular shaped helps them stand out from the two outer columns.
The navigation pad is large and has built in shortcuts to the phone book and SMS/picture messaging on its left and right points, while top and bottom move you up and down through menus. Additional buttons to the left and right of the navigation pad take you to the phone’s diary and the camera respectively, while softmenu keys give access to the rest of what this phone has to offer.
When it comes the remaining applications the list is short. There is a calendar, to do manager, text memo manager, voice memo utility, alarm clock, calculator, stopwatch, unit converter and world clock. You can assign contacts to up to seven groups and then give these their own ringtones, allowing you to identify what type of caller is trying to get through (friend, work colleague, special friend, spouse or partner, your kids, etc).The phone supports Java and comes with a Sudoku game built in.There is a Web browser with WAP 2.0 support. It didn’t perform too well during testing. For example, the TrustedReviews home page was simply too big for it to bother with while a 30k test page whose layout is controlled in tables and whose main content is ranged in two columns suffered from only the left hand column loading.
The small screen means that when you do get a Web page to load, you can’t see a great deal at once.
You can listen to the on board ringtones but this is not a music playing handset. It doesn’t have a player that can manage playlists, and the 2.5mm headset connector links to a provided mono earbud.With just 4MB of internal memory and no way to expand on this via flash memory cards as well as no Bluetooth or wired PC connectivity, you’d be stuck with downloading music over the air if playback were a viable option.
With that in mind I chose to measure battery life by seeing how long the KP202 lasted on standby rather than using the continuous music playback system I would normally go for. There is good news here, as the phone lasted for more than nine days which included some use for voice calls.
I’ve already mentioned the camera in passing. It is pretty basic, shooting stills at two resolutions – 320 x 240 and 640 x 480. The lens is on the front fascia so that when you flip the phone open it faces away from you. There are a couple of camera extras – a few filters, some settings for different lighting conditions and a three shot burst mode, for example, but it is all pretty basic stuff.
I got images off the KP202 by sending them as picture messages to another handset and it is those images you can see on the last page of this review. Some images can’t be got off the handset in this way due to the 100k limit on files inserted into MMS message, though.
The coloured dish which is my standard reference shot is OK but no more than that. The flower shows a lot of data compression. On the handset itself the image looked clearer, but it was the same colour as you see here. The flower is a striking crimson in the real world, and has been rendered in the photo as rather more pink.
Verdict
The LG KP202 is not for those who want mobile music, Web browsing or Bluetooth, but it is ergonomic to use, small and light to carry around and unpretentious.
If you need a simple phone that has to last a few days between charges and you can live with a pay as you go tariff, then this might be worth a look. Ultimately though, you don’t have to look far to find a better featured handset these days.
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