The LG-KU990 or LG-KE990 (known and marketed as the LG Viewty) is a high-end

mobile phone A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link whil ...

manufactured by

LG Electronics LG Electronics Inc. () is a South Korean multinational electronics company headquartered in Yeouido-dong, Seoul, South Korea. LG Electronics is a part of LG Corporation, the fourth largest '' chaebol'' in South Korea, and often considered a ...

, released in August 2007. It has a

resistive touchscreen In electrical engineering, a resistive touchscreen is a touch-sensitive computer display composed of two flexible sheets coated with a resistive material and separated by an air gap or microdots. Description and operation There are two diffe ...

and was specially marketed for its camera, being the first touchscreen phone with a powerful camera. It was succeeded by the

LG Renoir The LG KC910 Renoir is a high-end feature phone released by LG Electronics. The LG Renoir was the world's first full touchscreen 8-megapixel camera phone. It debuted on 2 October 2008 as the successor of the LG Viewty. Like the Viewty is incorpor ...

and later

LG Viewty Smart LG Corporation (or LG Group) (), formerly Lucky-Goldstar from 1983 to 1995 (Korean: ''Leokki Geumseong''; ), is a South Korean multinational conglomerate founded by Koo In-hwoi and managed by successive generations of his family. It is t ...

Features

Camera

The phone's main selling point was its 5-megapixel

digital camera A digital camera is a camera that captures photographs in digital memory. Most cameras produced today are digital, largely replacing those that capture images on photographic film. Digital cameras are now widely incorporated into mobile device ...

with

Schneider Kreuznach Schneider Kreuznach () is the abbreviated name of the company Jos. Schneider Optische Werke GmbH, which is sometimes also simply referred to as Schneider. They are a manufacturer of industrial and photographic optics. The company was founded on ...

optics,

Xenon Xenon is a chemical element with the symbol Xe and atomic number 54. It is a dense, colorless, odorless noble gas found in Earth's atmosphere in trace amounts. Although generally unreactive, it can undergo a few chemical reactions such as the ...

flash,

autofocus An autofocus (or AF) optical system uses a sensor, a control system and a motor to focus on an automatically or manually selected point or area. An electronic rangefinder has a display instead of the motor; the adjustment of the optical system ...

, and a digital image stabilizer. It featured an ISO 800-equivalent High-Sensitivity mode for night scenery shots and "Smart Light" for bright and clear images in the dark. It allowed capturing DivX

VGA Video Graphics Array (VGA) is a video display controller and accompanying de facto graphics standard, first introduced with the IBM PS/2 line of computers in 1987, which became ubiquitous in the PC industry within three years. The term can no ...

video at 30

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, and

QVGA The graphics display resolution is the width and height dimension of an electronic visual display device, measured in pixels. This information is used for electronic devices such as a computer monitor. Certain combinations of width and height ar ...

at 120fps for slow-motion playback. According to the manufacturer, the camera's frame rate was high enough to film a

balloon A balloon is a flexible bag that can be inflated with a gas, such as helium, hydrogen, nitrous oxide, oxygen, and air. For special tasks, balloons can be filled with smoke, liquid water, granular media (e.g. sand, flour or rice), or light so ...

bursting.

Applications

The device supported

Flash Lite Adobe Flash Lite (formerly Macromedia Flash Lite) was a lightweight version of Adobe Flash Player, a software application published by Adobe Systems for viewing Flash content. Flash Lite operates on devices that Flash Player cannot, such as mobi ...

2 and

MIDP Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP) is a specification published for the use of Java on embedded devices such as mobile phones and PDAs. MIDP is part of the Java Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME) framework and sits on top of Connected Limi ...

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2.0. There were a few built-in system applications like Office and a PDF document viewer, movie and photo editor, and Obigo web browser.

Later Releases

An updated model, the KU990i, was later released. It features a new camera module, the strobe flash is replaced by a LED, it has no image stabilization nor Schneider Kreuznach optics, although it features always-on flash mode and automatic smile and face detection. Physically, the inner camera lens seemed to be slightly smaller.

Limitations

The organizer in the phone could only store 100 calendar events and isn't officially listed on the compatible list with the popular GooSync, which helps sync phone calendars with Google Calendar (though it does work by using instructions for LG Arena). Also some public customer reviews of the LG Viewty stated concerns over poor battery life, mainly due to the large touchscreen. Also released was a variant without 3g called the KE990.

Sales

LG reported sales of 310,000 units in Europe in the first five weeks. A blog entry by UK mobile phone reseller Dial-A-Phone suggested that the Viewty may be outselling the

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple fruit tree, trees are agriculture, cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, wh ...

iPhone in the region, citing anecdotal reports of sluggish sales and Apple's reluctance to publish figures for the iPhone in the region as evidence. The pricing and featuresets of the two phones were used as an explanation.LG Viewty Outsells Apple iPhone in Europe
/ref> This story was picked up and widely reported by technology news sites and blogs, however without official sales figures for the iPhone, it could not be confirmed or refuted at the time. The phone was never released in the United States.

Specification sheet

References

External links

Official Website

TechCast Reviews the LG Viewty KU990 - with video
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lg Viewty (Ku990) KU990 Mobile phones introduced in 2007