Test drive of the LG KE970

In the last couple of days I had a chance of test the upcoming LG  KE970, codenamed ‘Shine’. I have received this unit from Hill & Knowlton, LG’s communications agency, for evaluation purposes. In this post I am summarizing my initial impressions.

First of all the phone is awesome! It has a full-metal case and the display is a mirror. When the phone is on standby then the display really acts as a mirror, whereas when the display is on it passes through. The effect is really spectacular, however its very difficult to take pictures of it or to video record what is happening on the display as the mirror fools the automatic focus of the cameras.

Shine Top  Shine 2

The package was also nice, although I received a pre-launch material which might differ from the commercial one. For instance, the manual and the sync softwares were missing (I took the pictures below with the phone’s camera at standard resolution 640×480). I also had an hard time to find the manual online (something in Korean here).

Shine Package  Shine Landscape



The display is really bright and the interaction with the scroll key is fluid. It took me some time to get used to the left-right function keys but after was easy to use. The menus are pretty intuitive and everything seemed easy to find. It has a 2MB camera with Schneider-Kreuznach lens (+ it has a flash), and it also records voice and video.

The image viewer is able to display Macromedia Flash animations and to open simple Office documents and PDFs.

The internal memory is 50 Mb with the possibility to extend it with microSD memory cards.

There are much better reviews out there that make a better work in detailing all the features of the phone [1], [2]. What I will be doing in the next posts is to detail how to use it with a Macintosh, the thing that interests me. So far it seems to be pretty hard …

One last thing: I posted a video on YouTube that I took with my iSight of the Menus of the phone. The result is decent but it was extremely difficult to realize due to the auto-focus problem discussed above.

More on the LG Sine Blog

6 Responses to “Test drive of the LG KE970”


  • Hi,

    It seems to be a theme that the Synch software is missing. It isn’t a surprise as I have just bought an lg shine and the stnch manager is utterly useless!

    There is no tech support, the help files are very basic and are no use, and my mobile phone operators can’t help get me synched up either. If using this phone with Outlook or similar is important – do not buy this phone.

    kind regards
    dave

  • hey well i just got the phone wich i find heavy of course but one thing that sucks is that the manual does not come in english and very hard to find. So if anyone knows were to find the english version on- line let me know.

  • hugo calderon

    how do i change the language on the phone?….

  • go to options or settings

  • i cant wat to buy it

Comments are currently closed.