LG GC900 Viewty Smart

Discontinued
20th April 2009

The LG GC900 Viewty Smart is the follow-up to the original LG Viewty, which has been around for about a year and a half. But although the GC900 bears the "Viewty" name, it is a significantly different and much improved device.

Featuring a large 3.0" 800 x 480 pixel touch-sensitive display, an 8.0 megapixel camera with an LED flash, 3.5G support, WiFi and integrated GPS, the Viewty Smart is an impressive device. It also features LG's new S-Class user interface (as found on the LG Arena), very strong video recording and playback functionality and a whole host of other interesting features, packed into an impressively lightweight 102 gram package.

The biggest problem that we can see here is market positioning - despite the model number, the LG GC900 is mostly better overall than the KC910 Renoir, except that the Renoir has a better flash. The user interface and high-resolution display make it very similar to the Arena, but the Viewty Smart has a better camera. Why didn't LG just put the 8 megapixel camera in the Arena? This sort of artificial model differentiation confuses customers, and it's one of the things that rivals Sony Ericsson suffer from greatly.

But there is no doubt that this is an impressive imaging phone, the 8.0 megapixel camera has Schneider-Kreuznach optics, autofocus, flash plus video recording capabilities of up to 720 x 480 pixels at 30 frames per second. Intelligent software in the Viewty Smart can cope with a variety of difficult shots, and it also has face detection, multi-shot capabilities and panoramic stitching.

The Viewty Smart has a DivX video codec already built in, plus playback support for a wide variety of media types including MP3, MPEG4, AAC and Windows Media formats. We don't know exactly how the overall multimedia experience in the Viewty Smart compares with the LG Arena, but they are both very capable devices.

Underneath, this is a quad-band GSM phone with dual-band UMTS 900 / 2100 MHz plus WiFi capabilities. HSDPA downloads are supported for a maximum of 7.2 Mbps, but the Viewty Smart does not appear to feature HSUPA for high-speed uploads.

It's a nice looking phone with some very promising features, but LG really need to simplify their range. After all, Apple has created a significant market share with just one iPhone model on the market at any one time. Perhaps LG would be wise to do the same when it comes to high-end touchscreen phones.

The LG GC900 Viewty Smart will be available from May 2009 onwards in Europe, followed by other regions at a later date.