Crrrack!

It took me a good 11 months to overcome my laziness, launch this blog and write about my LGU990 interface woes. But I guess the universe has a way of conspiring against us all. I consider myself to be a fairly patient person, but  when certain circumstances prevailed, I was forced to channel my anger...I guess it was the 3G channel this time :)

That's what the phone looks like today

This is one hit the phone simply couldn’t take and I guess the picture speaks for itself. The display behind the touch screen is destroyed, although the touch screen is working just fine. Since I am still able to make and receive calls, I have set myself a personal mission of dissecting the phone and replace the screen with one I found on e-bay. It should be an interesting little assignment for me.

Hopefully I’ll have updates soon.

Disgrace to competition

The coveted iPhone has been making its rounds in my head. In early 2009, since I didn't have the money for an iPhone, I needed to settle for something else. That's when I bumped into this review. I was looking for a phone available at a subsidized price with a carrier contract.

LG Viewty KU990 was the phone I decided to get along with my phone plan. In my hurry, a brief scan of the review was enough to convince me to get this phone. This phone was expected to "take on the iPhone".

To my disappointment, this is one of the worst phones I have used until now. Its interface is so poorly designed, it feels like the phone was barely tested before it was thrown into the market as a so-called iPhone competitor. I've tried to compile a few annoying things I have noticed about the phone's interface.

• The T9 dictionary is the most annoying feature of this phone. It adds random words to the phone dictionary. I still remember how when I first used the phone and was typing the word 'check', the phone for some reason defaults 'Agdaj'. I don't know how that word popped in there, but I can never again type check directly. Unless I perform a clean reset of the phone, I don't think Agdaj is going away. 
  
• Notice the sentence case in this scenario. I want to type the word Manohar at the start of a sentence. I spell it out, and LG saves the word to its dictionary as Manohar (notice the case). So it doesn't matter if I want to type my name in the middle of a sentence, the dictionary only saves the word Manohar (and not manohar). My old Sony Ericcson T610 did a better job in 2004!
• The phone tends toggle the t9 on and off randomly.  On an average, 3 out of 10 times, the t9 is off when I want to type a text message. But what I have noticed is...when I want to type any password (Gmail, Skype etc), t9 is on at least 75% of the time. Believe me, it has no relationship with what/how I typed anything previously. 
• The alarm clock on the phone does not ring when the phone is on vibrate! I don't know if LG had this planned as a "special " feature in its phone, but I think it is really stupid to have to put my phone on ringer ever night only so I can hear the alarm the next day. 
• The phone boasts pre-installed Google apps (Youtube, Gmail, Blogger, Maps) etc. It can also support Skype and several other Java apps also. But here's the real killer. Imagine you are checking your Gmail and you need to check something on Google Maps. Oops, this phone can only run one app at a time! So guess what...you have to close Gmail to run Maps.
• The phone comes with a funky looking music player. But guess what, that is an app too. Remember? Only one app at a time!
• Wanna play a game? Oops! Quit any other app!
• I can't describe how to scroll through the screen on this phone, but different sections on the phone need a different technique for scrolling.

What I've written above are mere annoyances I have faced with this phone. It obviously does not constitute as a complete review of the phone. Apparently I tend to write partial reviews :)