LG U890

Available now
13th May 2006

LG's latest 3G phone is an evolutionary upgrade of the LG U880 handset with a number of small but significant improvements to the previous model.

Like the U880, the U890 comes with a rotating 1.3 megapixel camera and a 176x220 pixel display, but this display is larger on the U890 with a 2.2" diagonal size (56mm) compared to 2.0 inches (51mm). Internal memory is around 70Mb, with a microSD (TransFlash) slot that will add up to another 512Mb of memory.

As with the previous model, the LG U890 plays back a wide variety of multimedia types including MP3, AAC and WMA audio, and MPEG4 and WMV video clips. Significantly, the LG U890 now supports stereo Bluetooth, and it retains the useful external media controls of the U880.

The LG U890 drops the U880's conventional keypad and replaces it with something similar to the Motorola RAZR V3i and LG P7200. This type of keypad will not be to everyone's taste, but it certainly looks good. The LG U890 has been slimmed sown to 18.5mm thick (from 19.2mm), presumably partly because of the different keypad. Overall, the U890 measures 100x50x18.5mm and weighs 103 grams, which makes it significantly lighter and somewhat more compact than the Motorola RAZR V3x, for example.

Talktime is around 3-3.5 hours, with around 10 days standby time, which is pretty typical for a 3G phone, although we are now seeing longer talktimes than this. We'd also expect to see a 2.0 megapixel camera at least, so it's a little disappointing to see that the LG U890 still only has 1.3 megapixels, but still it will be a useful camera for most purposes.

The LG U890 is available now on the Hutchison 3 network in most regions, including Australia, Hong Kong, the UK and Italy in blue, grey and pink variants.

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