LG Secret: The KF750 Review

LG Electronics may be one of the smaller and silent players in the mobile market but records showed it has made great success with a couple of earlier models. The LG Chocolate ranks as the 4th most popular phone of all time while the LG KU-250 became the first cheap 3G phone in the market. The new LG Secret will attempt to make a name for itself as well.

LG Mobile boasts of the Secret as the slimmest 5 megapixel slider phone so we’ll look into that feature first. Indeed, at 11.8mm it’s as thin as you can get for a slider phone. Majority of slider phones coming out of Motorola and Nokia are 15mm and upwards. It’s even slimmer than what Samsung dubbed as world slimmest phone — the SGH-D900 at 12.9mm. (See our unboxing pics here.)

Next is the 5 MP camera — LED flash, autofocus, with max resolution of 2,592 x 1,944 pixels. Taking normal wide shots in broad daylight is quite good but it becomes blurry at low light levels despite the ISO800 settings. Shutter speed is also slow (between 2-3 seconds) so taking close-up and macro shots as well as moving shots is a little hard. Here are the best samples of shots I took.

The lens is no Carl-Zeiss optics so the bump in megapixel didn’t really help much (compare this photo of the puppy with a similar shot using the N78’s 3.2MP Carl-Zeiss camera). The video recording on the other hand is smooth and of nice quality, attributed to the fast frame rates (VGA 30fps & QVGA 120fps). Audio quality is decent with high volume levels despite it not being in stereo.

The menu and navigation on the other hand is a hybrid of touch-sensitive navigation panel with haptics, limited touchscreen functions and physical button controls. The touch sensitive panels are lit by neon blue lights and reacts by blinking when tapped while the touchscreen functions can be enabled/disabled for selected functions such as playing music/videos, games, the FM radio or viewing photos and documents. It’s a good mix of navigational options although the touch panels can be a little quirky at times when you accidentally double-tap the metallic middle button with the bottom panel. Still, I learned to adapt and eventually liked the controls.

The LG KF750 runs on HSDPA 3.6MBps but missing on the connectivity is WiFi (the LG KF755 distributed in other regions doesn’t have HSDPA as well). There’s an FM radio tuner and a TV out so you can hook up the phone to your TV and play MPEG4/DivX movies up to 640×480. An accelerometer allows the phone to adjust display orientation.

The LG Secret’s design is also notable — touch screen is shielded with Tempered Glass, a metal/rubber/leatherette wrap-around casing and carbon fiber battery cover at the back. LG claims this is scratch-proof and I somewhat agree. I didn’t went all the way though by throwing the unit around. *heh*

LG Mobile has obviously packaged this phone for slider-lovers who look for slim, elegant designs. The 3rd in its Black Label Series (following the LG Chocolate and LG Shine), the LG Secret costs about Php24,800USD 423INR 35,826EUR 403CNY 3,078 in stores.