LG KC 910 Renoir is a touchscreen cell phone with 8-megapixel camera and truly amazing performance.
Introduction:
In 2008 we saw at least a few phones with touchscreens and a few with 8 megapixel cameras so there was a lot of competition between manufacturers. The LG KC 910 Renoir is among the best performers in both groups. The phone has not only excellent photo capability, but also built-in GPS, media player and DIVX/XVID support and nice video recording as well.
LG KC 910 Renoir pros:
+ 3″ 256K-color touchscreen TFT display (240 x 400 pixels)
+ Quad-band GSM, HSDPA 2100 MHz
+ 8 megapixel autofocus camera, xenon flash
+ Video recording in AVI format, VGA@30fps,
+ Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP
+ GPS receiver with A-GPS support
+ 100MB internal memory
+ Hot-swappable microSD card slot (8GB card in the box)
+ Accelerometer for auto screen rotate
+ DivX/XviD video playback
+ TV-out
+ Wi-Fi
LG KC 910 Renoir cons:
- No video streaming over Wi-Fi
- Xenon flash causes the camera to underexpose
- No Smart dialing Fullscreen camera viewfinder doesn’t show the entire frame
- QWERTY keyboard not available in Java apps
- No voice-guided GPS navigation
The design:
LG KC 910 Renoir measures 107.8 x 55.9 x 14 mm and weighs 114 grams. At first glance you see that the LG KC 910 Renoir is a phone well-thought out. The materials used are of very high quality to assure that the phone will serve you for years. The front of the phone is dominated by the 3-inch touchscreen with 240 x 400 resolution. Above the screen is the ambient light detector which adjusts screen brightness to the current lighting conditions. The screen quality and brightness are generally very good, however, in direct sunlight it is sometimes difficult to see the details. Also a video-call camera is to be found above the screen. Below the screen are the three hard buttons. At the back of the LG KC 910 Renoir is the camera lens with a cover and the Xenon flash. The left side of LG KC 910 Renoir houses the microSD card slot and the universal connectivity port, whereas the right side features camera controls.
Performance:
The LG KC 910 Renoir runs on 1000mAh battery which according to the manufacturer should suffice for over 250 hours of standby or three hours of talking, but as you will most probably use it also for listening to music, taking photos and so on, it may vary. The phone feels really small considering how much it can do and it handles very nicely. When you press a key the phone vibrates to let you know it accepted the command. The vibration strength is customizable. Thanks to multitasking you can run several Java applications at one time and switch between them without any effort.
Thanks to the built-in accelerometer browsing images is very pleasant. While browsing you may also edit photos and apply effects such as: black & white, sepia, face morphing and some others. You can also rotate and resize your photos and change colors and saturation.
The music player in LG KC 910 Renoir is also really nice. You can browse your music library by artist, genre or album, you can view the album artwork and make your own playlists. The sound quality is satisfactory and although the LG KC 910 Renoir has no equalizer presets it has something called the Dolby for Mobile which works even better than the equalizers could. LG KC 910 Renoir is also capable of receiving radios with RDS.
The video player in LG KC 910 Renoir is a genuine masterpiece. The phone supports DIVX/XVID out of the box and in all resolutions. Thanks to a handy feature you can also upload the videos you are watching to Youtube, or take screenshots.
When it comes to Internet browsing the LG KC 910 Renoir does not disappoint. The pre-installed browser works just fine, the websites are well rendered. With the touchscreen it is easy to navigate through the sites, the accelerometer lets you easily change the orientation and yo get the ‘find-on-page’ function as well.
Image quality:
The maximum resolution of photos taken with the LG KC 910 Renoir is 3264 x 2448 and if it wasn’t for the xenon flash the photos would be just perfect. The LG KC 910 Renoir uses the display as a viewfinder and that is not too bad an idea, but unfortunately the camera sensor has a different aspect ratio than the widescreen viewfinder, some of the image gets cropped. You get a really big bunch of options like: white balance, scene mode, color effects, self timer, ISO, face recognition and so on. The image quality itself is almost-perfect and probably the best among the 8 megapixel cameraphones. The LG KC 910 Renoir catches plenty of detail, has great sharpness, and renders natural colors. Also the noise is not too noticeable. The LG KC 910 Renoir can also record videos in VGA resolution at 30 fps in equally good quality. Additionally, the clips are recorded as avi files with DivX compression.
Menus / ease of use:
The interface in LG KC 910 Renoir has been refreshed and so you can see plenty of nice animations throughout the menus. Although the menus and animations sometimes seem a bit slow the overall interface works slightly faster than in its direct competitor – Samsung Pixon. To make the LG KC 910 Renoir more fun to work with t has plenty of widgets to put on your homescreen. The phone also offers quite nice customization options for those of you who like to have everything your own way.
The phonebook in LG KC 910 Renoir can store up to 1000 contacts with multiple fields for emails, phone numbers, birthdays, notes and so on. Of course, you can assign a ringtone to a contact, or to a group of contacts. You can choose to view only SIM contacts, the phone contacts, or all of them. The messaging with the LG KC 910 Renoir is trouble-free and you get a few writing options like: handwriting recognition, alphanumeric keyboard, or the full QWERTY keyboard in landscape mode. The emails have one major fault though. The maximum attachment size is 2 MB for outgoing emails and 300KB for incoming ones.
Selected LG KC 910 Renoir features and specifications:
GENERAL
2G Network GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
3G Network HSDPA 2100 / 900
HSDPA 850 / 1900 – American version
DISPLAY
Type TFT touchscreen, 256K colors
Size 240 x 400 pixels, 3.0 inches
- Flash UI
- Accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate
- Downloadable wallpapers
RINGTONES
Type Polyphonic, MP3
Customization Composer, Download
Vibration Yes
MEMORY
Phonebook Yes, Photocall
Call records 40 dialed, 40 received, 40 missed calls
Card slot microSD (TransFlash), up to 8GB
DATA
GPRS Class 10 (4+1/3+2 slots), 32 – 48 kbps
HSCSD No
EDGE Yes
3G HSDPA, 7.2 Mbps
WLAN Wi-Fi 802.11b/g
Bluetooth Yes, v2.0 with A2DP
Infrared port No
USB Yes, v2.0
FEATURES
Messaging SMS, EMS, MMS, Email
Browser WAP 2.0/xHTML, HTML
Games Yes
Colors Black
Camera 8 MP, 3264×2448 pixels, autofocus, video(VGA 30fps, QVGA up to 120fps), xenon flash; secondary VGA videocall camera
- Built-in GPS with aGPS function
- Camera geo-tagging, face, smile and blink detection
- FM radio
- Java MIDP 2.0
- MP3/MPEG4/AAC/DivX/Xvid player
- Organiser
- Document viewer (DOC, XLS, PDF)
- TV-out
- Voice memo
- Built-in handsfree
- T9
Other recently reviewed mobile phones:
Samsung B2700, Samsung i900 Omnia, Samsung U800, Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1,
Sony Ericsson G705.