By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla
As far as feature phones go, the LG KM555R Shine Touch is surprisingly feature packed for such a lightweight and compact unit.
Available exclusively from Rogers for $49.99 on select three-year plans (or $249 for the contract free price) The LG Shine Touch takes inspiration from some familiar touch enabled smartphones in the market today even if it is sufficiently smaller.
Hold the phone in your hand and it is as light as its aluminum and chrome enclosure. Most of the side buttons are hidden and the call begin and call end buttons are recessed under the plastic touchscreen to give the impression of touch-sensitive buttons.
The LG Shine Touch comes with customizable menus that work a lot like widgets that access the Internet via Wi-Fi or Rogers’ 3G service to keep you updated on Facebook, e-mail, the weather and various other ‘connected’ services. The phone is quite speedy at handling these widgets even though the 3’ inch touchscreen is too small to manage all of these effectively. People with OCD who like everything neat and tidy are likely to freak out once they see the mess of colourful icons strewn haplessly around the device’s screen.
Still, since it is customizable, you can go as bare as you wish and simply access the widgets from the menu as you need them. Screen brightness, tactile feedback (which vibrates when a virtual button has been pressed) and overall quality are quite good but not high resolution. As a result of this, photos taken by the built-in 3 megapixel camera may look a bit washed out in camera even though they are perfectly exposed when viewed elsewhere.
The LG Shine Touch has 3G that can access Roger’s HSPA network and it also has built in Wi-Fi which means it is an intrinsically connected device and theoretically should be able to surf the web from anywhere on that 3’ inch touchscreen. The problem is that the included browser isn’t very good and the QWERTY aspect to the touch keyboard is only available when the device is tilted to landscape mode. Most of the time, you need to use multi-tap to spell out URLs and web addresses. We found this to be agonizingly slow at times.
Still, hats off to LG for including a rich feature set in such a small and compact phone. MicroSD expansion for music and photos, a regular sized headphone jack, Dolby Mobile audio, and a long lasting battery in what is one of the lightest phones in the market today. While its obvious this isn’t a feature phone pretending to be a smartphone, many of the standard features transcend its mid-level price point.
So, who is this phone for? We imagine it is ideal for younger users provided they can manage with the built-in software keyboard. All the other features, namely the music, the widgets, the social media and the camera are ripe for the younger set but this segment loves to text. Can they do it well on this device that is the question.
The LG Touch Shine had good reception and very good call quality so it is a very capable little 3G phone but not ideal for accessing websites on the go.
Rating 4 out of 5