This morning I received a pre-release LG Shine KE970 courtesy of the LG Shine Blog, as a lead-in to the product launch in early February. I've spent a couple of hours using it, and I must say I'm impressed so far. I've got about five pages of notes, niggles and thoughts that I'm going to write up over the next few days. In the meantime, I took some pictures of it, my old Nokia 6280, and some fruit. Not exactly art, I'll admit.
Until the renowned LG Chocolate came out, I'd never considered getting an LG mobile. I was a Nokia user for years right up until the Sony Ericsson T610 came out, and then onto a Motorola Timeport for a beta test (yick), and then back to Nokia using newer Symbian-based phones. After switching to Three from Orange, I'm now limited to 3G phones, which unfortunately means I can't use the Shine as my main phone as this specific model is 2G-only. So instead, I'm using the Orange Pay-As-You-Go SIM I got for emergencies (and more importantly, free cinema tickets)
My first impression is that this is an attractive, satisfying, solid, well-engineered unit physically, with software that, on the whole, is fairly conservative but smooth and simple, and default ringtones that really must win an award for unashamed cheesiness. I can tell straight away that I'm going to enjoy testing it.
Continue on to Part 2 of my review: "LG Shine KE970: The Hardware".
(I must also add that the phone is being loaned to me by LG's representatives. However, I should also mention that the agreement I have with them is pretty cool: I have absolutely no obligations to write anything nice about their product, or even write anything at all. Of course I am going to post a fairly in-depth review next week, but they do ask that I address any problems I have with them first, presumably so they can correct any misunderstandings before I post incredibly uninformed rants all over the place. Fair point. If, on the other hand, they can't address any problems I have, then there will be nothing stopping me from posting those issues here.
[...] Tom Gidden has written a pre-release review on LG Shine, sharing his first impressions of the phone in an upfront manner. What impressed me most are his ’still life’ photos of fruit taken by the phone. [...]
Has anyone got this to do bluetooth handsfree with a TomTom GPS unit yet? It pairs etc but TT 910 says no dial tone.