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 | LG KF900 PradaLast week we saw Samsung ride on the Emporio Armani youth appeal and now we're back by the catwalk with the more moderate, perhaps even conservative, but nonetheless attractive, new Prada phone by LG. Key features: -3-inch 262K-color capacitive touchscreen display of WQVGA resolution -Comfortable QWERTY keyboard -5 megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash -D1 (720x480) resolution video recording at 30fps -Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support -Dual band 3G with HSDPA support -Wi-Fi -Responsive Flash-based interface with multi-touch support -Bluetooth v2.1 with A2DP and USB v2.0 -Stylish and generous retail package -microSD memory card slot (verified to work with 16GB cards) -FM radio with RDS -Accelerometer sensor for screen auto rotate -TV-out -Office document viewer -DivX video support -Fashion-related content preloaded It was about time the first Prada phone by LG got an update, no doubt about that. Data transfers, connectivity, multimedia and user interface upgrades are spot on, but a hardware QWERTY keyboard was hardly essential. It's the Prada phone after all, and it probably needs all those buttons as much as the Sonim rugged phones need a Dolce & Gabbana carrying case. Oh well, all-in-one QWERTY touchscreens are obviously the new black. Or so the LG KF900 Prada believes. Keen to find a niche within the niche, it lands right in the middle of not so friendly smartphone crowd. It's got the features to stand up to the XPERIA, HTC and the likes but it's kinda hard to imagine the ruthless WinMo machine melting with pity for the adorable, helpless, irresistible Prada. Anyway, we think we'd be better off skipping our traditional round of window shopping this time. After all comparing the Prada to the smart messengers running Symbian or Windows Mobile will be irrelevant and unfair. There will be of course references to equally equipped messengers as we go, for both performance and looks, but that will be all. Design and construction The original Prada was more of a fashion accessory - the first touchscreen GSM phone by LG and the haute couture label were the features that stood out clearly against the unimpressive spec sheet. The new release is a major upgrade in weaponry - interface, connectivity, multimedia - but there's nothing on the exterior to suggest that. The two Prada phones look such complete clones on the outside that the QWERTY keypad becomes the most eye-catching - though hardly most important - feature. Looking at the front of both Prada phone you almost can't tell the difference. The front facing camera is the only tip. The black and chrome combination remains intact. And again, the body is all plastic, including the chrome-finished elements. Right on top of the display, is the centrally placed earpiece. The Prada logo is below and the top right corner hosts the front-facing camera. The rest of the front is the 3" capacitive touchscreen display. The use of capacitive technology means the contact with the screen is possible only by fingers - no stylus or nails. However the thing is more sensitive than the regular resistive touchscreens that most LG touch phones use. The original Prada phone also had the same type of the display, as well both Apple iPhones. The Prada display size and resolution (240 x 400 pixel, WQVGA) are the same as in the first GSM touch phone by LG two years ago - the original Prada phone. Right under the screen are the only hardware controls found on the LG KF900 Prada - a Back key squeezed in between the Call and End/Power buttons. The microSD card slot if on the right-hand side of the phone. It is covered with a lid to keep away dirt and dust. Right under it are the touchscreen lock knob and the Launcher/Multitasking key. It opens a tabbed menu where the first tab displays shortcuts to user-defined favorite features while the second hosts the Task Manager. With the help of the Task Manager you can get to the home screen without closing the application you are currently using and you can also have several Java apps running in the same time. The last control on the right side of the Prada 2 is the shutter key. The camera on the Prada messenger is auto-focus enabled, so the shutter key gets pressed in two steps. The camera key is OK to use, with a distinct half press but most often than not pressing it slides the back part of the device down so using it takes some extra patience. On the left you'll find the volume rocker. It is chrome-finished (like all side controls) and quite comfortable to use. It also serves as a zoom lever in the camera but is of questionable value: you'll need to press it with your left thumb, while holding the handset in landscape position. At the handset's top is the charger/headset connector which, like the memory card slot, is covered by a protective cap. On its left is the lanyard eyelet. Only the mouthpiece is to be found at the bottom. The all-black, all-plastic rear clearly takes after the original Prada phone. The camera lens, LED flash and the small self-portrait mirror are placed in the top left corner, all within a stylish metal plate. In the original Prada phone, the camera lens was in between the flash and the mirror, while now it's the first in line. It is right in the very top corner of the body, and we did end up with a finger across the lens quite too often. There is no latch for releasing the battery cover. A tiny knob provides a thumb rest to gently slide the cover downwards. By the way, the same knob keeps the exposed camera lens from rubbing against any surface when the phone is laid on its back. The LG KF900 Prada battery life won't let you down. The 950 mAh unit gets you covered for a good two days of fairly extensive use. Direct comparisons to, say, the 1500 mAh battery of the XPERIA would be irrelevant, as the Prada phone has neither the screen resolution nor the smartphone platform of its Sony Ericsson counterpart. It's more like Renoir's 1000 mAh battery, which we were more than happy with. The LG KF900 Prada handles quite comfortably and its build quality is just fine. For the time of testing we didn't note any unwelcome rattles and creaks in the casing. The controls are altogether friendly and the slider action smooth and solid. The handset is hardly a match for the intimidating solidity of the XPERIA but stays faithful to the original Prada styling. The all plastic case feels quite durable. The only turnoff is the fingerprint-prone piano black finish, which makes a mess of the handset, so the supplied cleaning cloth will be put to much use. Display - no stylus needed LG KF900 Prada has the display of its predecessor in terms of both size and resolution, but most importantly - they share the same capacitive touchscreen technology. In layman's terms, it's either your fingertips or bust. The LG KF900 Prada screen supports multi touch, which is a treat in web browsing and photo viewing. All it takes to zoom in is a pinch on the screen. By the way, comparison with the iPhone is inevitable - the Apple iPhone screen is built on the same technology. Unfortunately the pinch zooming is quite unpredictable - sometimes it zooms more than you expect. The KF900 Prada display is vibrant and detailed. Brightness is adjustable, but contrast isn't. The screen is quite usable outside on a bright sunny day, but sunlight legibility is not the best we've had. Comparison to handsets like HTC Touch HD and XPERIA X1 is definitely not in favor of the Prada phone. But while the display resolution is a weak spot, touchscreen sensitivity and interface response is impressive. Good QWERTY keyboard The QWERTY keyboard is a defining feature of the new Prada phone by LG. It does put the handset in a rather tight niche where competition is lower but tougher. Well, at least in QWERTY terms, the LG KF900 Prada has nothing to be ashamed of. Its slide-out keyboard is comfortable, tactile and responsive. Buttons are 7 mm wide and there is 1.5 mm space between them. Each key is raised and etched at the bottom, resulting in tangible terracing of the rows. The press is solid and touch orientation quite good. Overall, the Prada QWERTY keyboard is slightly better than the XPERIA's in terms of key size and tactility, and overall comfort of use. Both handsets share a major weakness though -inadequate headroom for the top row of keys. Sliding the QWERTY keyboard out, the screen automatically flips landscape mode. Pressing any of the number keys launches the dialing screen. If you slide the keypad back in while dialing, the digits you typed remain on screen so you can pick up where you left. The keypad backlighting is very adequate, the solid white illumination making the handset both attractive and quite comfortable to use in the dark. The familiar UI with multi-touch upgrade The KF900 Prada uses the latest Flash-based touch user interface by LG. The first handset we saw that in was the LG KE850 Prada, subsequently followed by the LG KU900 Viewty, the LG KF700 and finally in the 8MP cameraphone LG KC910 Renoir. Before we go on a trip through all the menus, we must mention of one really interesting upgrade of the LG Prada 2 user interface. The latest Prada phone has multi-touch support, which makes it the second multi-touch handset in the world after the iPhone. If you've played with the Apple gadget already, you know the difference it makes and what it feels like. If you don't - well you've certainly heard about it. Again, much like on the iPhone, with the capacitive touch display the contact with the screen is possible only by fingers - no stylus or nails. We are rather surprised to see that the user interface of the LG Prada 2 is quite faster and more responsive than the LG Renoir implementation, which tended to get on our nerves at times. Here's a quick video demoing the LG Prada 2 interface - from the new optional layout of the main menu through the cube-like 3D home screen to multi-touch zooming. LG made a very strange decision to remove the option for re-arranging the main menu icons, which we praised in the Renoir. The items are fixed again, just like in the Viewty, so you'll have to like it or lump it. Thanks to the built-in accelerometer, the LG KF900 Prada interface auto rotates when you turn the handset to landscape mode but only in selected applications such as the image gallery, video player or the web browser. This screen rotation however works every time you slide open the QWERTY keyboard. Rotation is smooth and the phone reacts promptly to your movement. When you slide the keyboard out the homescreen even changes its layout and some new shortcuts appear allowing you to start a new message or go through some other applications such as image gallery, web browser, calendar, memo, and to-do's. Unlike the LG Renoir, the LG Prada 2 has three different homescreens which you can switch between by swiping your finger across the screen. This causes them to rotate like the sides of a pyramid, creating the illusion of 3D. The first one is the customizable screen with widgets. The second is empty, decorated only with the Prada and operator logo. The last one is used for quick access to applications through customizable shortcuts. Three is certainly better than one and we are delighted by this new addition. LG have also added some Prada-themed content on the device. There are a bunch of wallpapers for example picturing fashion models presenting Prada collections on the catwalk. Each time you lock the phone the wallpaper automatically changes to a new one. The music player does the job The Prada has almost the same Music player as the LG Renoir. You can filter tracks as with any other up to date music player - by artist, album, genre, and recently played. User-created playlists are also an option. There are no available visualizations. The only other option is Album art but it's a really nice treat as the album image gets as large as one third of the screen . Naturally, the music player can run in the background. If you want you can control the music straight on the home screen with the dedicated widget. The player interface has changed a bit since the Renoir. Besides the larger album picture, the dedicated buttons for sound, repeat and shuffle are moved down to the right corner. And as you can see from the shots the three music buttons are bigger and more touch-friendly than on the Renoir. The missing equalizer options in the Renoir are now history and the Prada 2 has five different presets available to the user. Audio quality The LG KF900 Prada did decently in our audio quality test, recording excellent noise level and dynamic range readings. The distortion levels are also one of the best we have seen recently. The frequency response graph indicates the existence of some mid and high-pass filter that cuts out the extremely low frequency sounds. The stereo crosstalk reading however is simply disastrous. This is an anti-record in our test indicating that the handset is basically lacking stereo capabilities – a good portion of what is played in one channel is also received through the other. Video player accepts DivX The LG Prada video player is among the most attractive features of the handset due to its support of DivX - still a rare feature on most mobile phones. This enhanced video support is not even listed in the official specs list or commercials, so we are pleasantly surprised. The KF900 successfully played most of the DivX movies we threw at it walking in the boots of LG Renoir. However, the Prada does not do XviD at all - either officially or unofficially. Thanks to the widescreen display, wide aspect videos are a treat in fullscreen landscape mode. The semi-transparent control overlay disappears in a few seconds or when you tap on the screen so they don't get in the way. There's an elaborate video editor on board as well. Online video - still in the dark The new Prada does not come with any form of YouTube integration. You can't upload videos to YouTube directly from the handset as you can with the Renoir. Unfortunately, the LG Prada web browser doesn't have Flash support, so watching YouTube videos from the desktop version of the web site is a no-go. The same holds true for the previous LG hi-end handsets too - Viewty and Renoir. The only way to watch your favorite videos is via the mobile version of YouTube.com where videos get streamed in 3GP format over the RTSP protocol. If that's more mumbo-jumbo than you can handle, here's what it means. The mobile version of YouTube found at m.youtube.com gets you access to the same videos as the desktop version, however they are of inferior in quality so that they can be played over the wireless carrier network - EDGE or UMTS. Strange as it may seem, the Prada only allows you to watch streaming media (of any type) over an EDGE or UMTS connection (just as in the Renoir), - which means you cannot watch streaming mobile YouTube videos over Wi-Fi. This is odd since the Wi-Fi option is available in the streaming menu, but the Prada just refuses to accept it. Perhaps the retail version of the device will have those bits and pieces sorted out. Camera is frustrating The new LG Prada comes with a Schneider-Kreuznach lens. As there are only a few 8 megapixel cameraphones currently, 5 megapixels still counts for something. The maximum image resolution the LG KF900 Prada provides is 2592x1944 pixels. Video recording is about as good as you can get on a mobile phone - 720x480 pixels at 25 frames per second. Schneider-Kreuznach is an acclaimed manufacturer of industrial and photographic optics. In fact the company has won several Oscars awards for Technical Achievements (yes, the Hollywood type of Oscars). We don't know how much of the winning technology made it to a lens for a mobile phone but one thing is certain - putting Prada and an Oscar in the same sentence attracts a lot of attention. But we digress. The 5-megapixel camera the te Prada 2 is equipped with is a sizeable improvement over the two-megapixel snapper found on the original Prada phone by LG. The camera user interface has been updated too and now looks closer to that of the Renoir. Unlike the Renoir however you now get to choose whether the viewfinder should go fullscreen (effectively cropping the top and bottom) or it should fit the entire frame on the screen. That last fit-it-all option leaves two black bars on the left and right of the viewfinder, but that's quite understandable as the screen aspect ratio and the camera sensor ratio are different. We've got to say that this is our preferred viewfinder mode with the LG Prada. Still, we would have enjoyed the company of several permanently visible shortcuts on those unused side bars - what a waste! Another hit on usability is that quite often pressing the side shutter key slides the LG Prada 2 open. It's a small annoyance but nonetheless one. There's a workaround of course - you can use the virtual shutter key on the screen, but it doesn't allow for half-press focus lock - it just focuses and snaps the photo immediately. Now about the camera features. There are three shooting modes: normal shot, burst shot and panorama - nothing fancy here. Burst mode lets you shoot 3, 6 or 9 photos in rapid succession and lets you choose which ones to keep. Choosing this option however forces the device to a lower resolution. It switches to 1280 x 960 pixels for 3- and 6-shots mode and to the lowly 640 x 480 for 9-shots mode. Panorama is a bit disappointing too as it only takes three photos in VGA (640x480 pixels) resolution. The rest of the camera settings include the run-of-the-mill white balance, ISO, macro mode, exposure compensation, self-timer, color effects. Image quality Overall, the performance of the LG Prada 2 camera is average. Five megapixels may sound like much and in fat they are - but only as a quantitative description, not as a qualitative one. Of course, you should bear in mind that we have a pre-release unit on our hands and image quality is bound to improve. We don't really expect any R&D department of a reputable manufacturer to release a product without fine tuning the image quality. At the moment the fine detail image processing is somehow all wrong and as a result it's details that suffer. The really low contrast and some of the lens imperfections don't help the situation either. Image noise though seems reasonable and colors are captured fairly accurately. The camera however excels in macro shots but still suffers from the processing issues. There are nice levels of detail and as you can see the text is perfectly readable. Summing it up, we're highly disappointed by the image quality of our reviewing sample of LG Prada 2. Image quality is bound to be fine tuned in the final retail version. Video recording Unfortunately, video recording is another a let down with our LG Prada 2 but this time we suppose the same will hold true for the retail version as well. Much like the LG KC550, the LG Prada 2 records at the relatively high resolution of 720x480 pixels (the so-called D1). The recording reaches up to 25fps but feels choppy and despite the high resolution it looks really pixelated with even artifacts appearing on occasion - all due to a low bit rate setting. The bit rate is less than half of those of the videos VGA recorded with the LG Renoir and you can really tell the difference. Audio is encoded at 8000Hz sample rate with the AMR codec as opposed to Renoir's 16000Hz sample rate and MP3 codec. Video also have the same aspect ratio problem as LG KC550 and D1 videos produced by the Prada 2 have a 4:3 aspect ratio when watched on a computer instead of the slightly widescreen aspect ratio you would expect from that resolution. As a result subjects appear strangely elongated on video. That may sound as a positive feature for some fashion models as it would make them look thinner however it hardly makes us geeks happy. The solution to watch those videos normally is to force the 3:2 aspect ratio from your video player. That however sounds like a potential source of a lot of headaches when sharing videos with other people that are not aware of this peculiarity. But don't take our word for all this, here is a sample D1 video. Things don't get much better than that even at VGA resolution, as the bitrate is still rather low. Here you can check a VGA video sample recorded with the Prada 2 as well. Confusing but overall nice web browser The browser is pretty nice, almost identical to the one on the Renoir. It scrolls and pans quite fast. Thanks to the multi-touch implementation on the capacitive touch screen it can do what eludes most other browsers - the legendary "pinch" zoom. Don't expect stellar speeds though. It takes quite a while to zoom in and often you end up repeating the gesture because you're not sure you did it right the first time. And when it zooms in too much you have to zoom out which isn't much better. The controls hide automatically after a couple of seconds but you can bring them up with a quick tap on the screen. The accelerometer comes into play when you turn the phone to landscape orientation and the browser rotates very quickly. A useful feature is that you can have two pages open at the same time as tabs and switch back and forth between them. Saving pages for offline viewing is another thing that you'd probably use quite often. Another thing that the browser does easily is search web pages for specific words - it highlights the first match and provides an indication of how many matches there are in total plus arrow keys for switching between them. An eye candy enhancement of the plain browsing history list is the option to view it as snapshots of the pages you visited. You can flick between the pages and open the one you are looking for by tapping it. |
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