The new LG KS360 is a midrange mobile phone clearly aimed at the teen users with quite nice functionality and feature list.
Overview:
LG KS360 has a large, good quality display which is a nice touch as the lower end phones rarely have good screens. Moreover, the LG KS360 has a 2 megapixel camera built-in, document viewer, audio and video player and a web browser. The overall built quality is more than decent, so you might wander if that indeed is a mid-range phone. Well, let’s have a closer look at it and you’ll see for yourself.
LG KS360 pros:
+ Tri-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support
+ Large 2.4″ TFT display of QVGA resolution
+ Full slide-out QWERTY keyboard with screen rotation
+ Touchscreen dialing
+ 2 megapixel camera
+ Stereo Bluetooth
+ FM radio
LG KS360 cons:
- No UMTS support
- No camera autofocus
- Poor video recording resolution
- Awkward file manager
- Uncomfortable phonebook
- No smart dialing
The design:
LG KS360 measures 101.5 x 51 x 16.8 mm and weighs 111.5 grams so it is surely not the thinnest phone on the market, yet it handles nicely. The front of the LG KS360 is dominated by the 2.4-inch TFT screen with QVGA resolution. Below the screen are a few round, hard keys. The LG KS360 is a slider and so when you slide it you will see a full QWERTY keyboard. Both the hard keys and the keyboard are very responsive, tactile and pleasant to use. On the left side of LG KS360 you will see a microSD memory card slot, along with the LG universal port for charging, headphones and data transfer. The right side of LG KS360 features the volume rocker and the shutter key. The back of LG KS360 houses the camera lens and a self portrait mirror.
Performance:
The LG KS360 can run about 5 hours of talk time and more or less 430 hours in stand-by mode. The in-call voice quality of very good, as is the reception. The phone can still work without a SIM card, although you won’t be able to browse your contacts then. Then again, with the SIM card in you can still opt for the Flight Mode. The LG KS360 is partially touch-operated, in that in some menus you can actually use th screen to give the phone instructions. Although that does not work for all menu levels it is still a nice touch in a midrange phone.
The music player in LG KS360 is, unfortunately, of rather poor quality. As i mention below, your multimedia files have to be in appropriate folders to be seen by the phone. Moreover, you cannot sort your music by artist, album, or anything. The player does not display the album art, but has a few equalizer presets. The video player is also very basic and works only in landscape mode.
The built-in web browser is terrible. Not only is it slow and sender the pages poorly, but also panning the sites is terrible. Fortunately you can easily download a better browser, like Opera mini for example and you are ready to go.
Image quality:
The 2 megapixel, fixed focus camera in LG KS360 is quite nice, ans better than the one found in the iPhone. The camera has no flash so you can forget about taking photos in poor light. You get some basic features like self times, multi shot and effects like sepia or black and white. The maximum image resolution is 1600 x 1200 pixels. The colors are rendered accurately, the noise is acceptable and only sometimes the photos are slightly oversharpened.
Menus / ease of use:
The menu structure in LG KS360 is very easy to grasp and quite nice to use. For sure if you have used an LG you will have no trouble with LG KS360. There are some awkward software limitations, though. You get dedicated folders for almost all file types, and as long as you want to use the files they have to be in those folders. You cannot copy your files and you can only move them. But so what, if they still need to be in those folders to be used? The media card also gets a separate folder in the menus and works quite fast.
The phone has a quite limited phonebook. Sure it can store up to a 1000 contacts, but the contacts have only up to 11 fields for information (and this includes 3 fields for phone numbers). The contacts are ordered only by the first name and there is no smart dialing.
Selected LG KS360 features and specifications:
General 2G Network GSM 900 / 1800 / 1900
Display Type TFT, 256K colors
Size 240 x 320 pixels, 2.4 inches
- Touch Screen Dialling
- Full QWERTY keyboard
- Downloadable themes
Ringtones Type Polyphonic (64 channels), MP3
Customization Download
Vibration Yes
Memory Phonebook 1000 entries, Photocall
Call records 30 dialed, 30 received, 30 missed calls
Card slot microSD up to 4GB,
- 15 MB shared memory
Data GPRS Yes
HSCSD No
EDGE Yes
3G No
WLAN No
Bluetooth Yes, v2.0 with A2DP
Infrared port No
USB Yes, v2.0
Features Messaging SMS, MMS, Email, IM
Browser WAP 2.0/xHTML, HTML
Games Yes, order now
Colors Black and red, Black and silver, White and soft pink, Titanium and bright blue
Camera 2 MP, 1600×1200 pixels, video
- Java MIDP 2.0
- MP3 player
- MPEG-4 player
- FM radio
- Photo/video editor
- Built-in handsfree
- Voice memo
Battery Standard battery, Li-Ion 800 mAh
Stand-by Up to 430 h
Talk time Up to 5 h
Other recently reviewed mobile phones:
Samsung M7500 Emporio Armani, Nokia E63, LG KC 910 Renoir, Sony Ericsson G705, Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1, Samsung L700, Nokia N85, Sony Ericsson T700, Samsung M8800 Pixon.