LG KF750 Secret - early review

29 April 2008

LG has kindly sent us a review sample of the stunning new 5 megapixel Secret phone. Here are our first thoughts

The LG KF750 Secret is the most exciting phone to land so far this year. It looks dreamy, it's loaded with features and it's as tough as a honey badger.

Mobile Choice will of course be giving the phone a full review very shortly, but these are our first thoughts after one full day with the phone.

LG KF750 Secret look and feel

The phone feels as good as it looks. It's perfectly weighted for a luxury handset and manages to marry great styling with a really robust build. The tempered glass screen is promoted as being scratch proof. We'd like to say that we really gave it a beating, but the phone is just too pretty to be mean to, so we had to make do with jabbing it with our house keys a few times. However, while it seems immune to key scratches it does attract fingerprint smudges, so regular polishing is required.

As for the rest of the device, the top is encased in toughened plastic, the back is carbon fiber and the sides and base of the phone have a rubberised feel. All of the materials feel tough, sleek and expensive, which is some feat.

The Secret's touchscreen

The KF750 is not a full touchscreen phone in the mould of the Apple iPhone or the LG Viewty. Instead, the handset offers six touch-sensitive keys which sit just beneath the display, as well as four mechanical soft keys. As with other handsets which employ a similar semi-touchscreen system, it works to a point.

When menu options appear on screen, your instinct is to press them to interact with them as you can with the Viewty, the KF700 or the iPhone. You must get used to operating the phone with a combination of haptic (vibrating) virtual keys and mechanical keys.

However, you have to hand it to LG, they know how to make virtual haptic keys sexy. Every time you press one, as well as feeling a small vibration, you'll see a ripple effect of blue neon light which looks very pretty.

The 5 megapixel camera

The LG Secret has grabbed headlines for being the world's slimmest mobile to carry a 5 megapioxel camera. But is the camera any good? To be honest, there's such a demand for more megapixels that most consumers will be happy just to have the 5 megapixel boxed ticked. The camera functions in the same way as the version on other recent LG phones, with a series of on-screen settings and commands which are navigated with the virtual four-way joypad.

Functions include macro and a flash that can be set to automatic and settings include brightness, white balance, ISO, timer, continuous shot and panoramic.

The shutter speed is quick and the shots appear clear, even indoors. Our only niggle concerned the touch sensitive controls, which are a little fiddly while navigating settings.

There are also a couple of editing 'cheats' if your photo making skills are not quite up to scratch. Morphing lets you edit a subject's face (streching noses and padding lips, etc), while SmartLight auto-sdjusts the picture's light settings.

The LG Secret's accelerometer sensor

The LG Secret has loads of tricks up its sleeve, including the Yahoo search engine, the mobile broadband HSDPA browsing speeds and the DivX quality video. But the feature that really makes us smile is the gaming functionality.

Choose M-Toy in the Secret's games menu and you'll be able to choose from six games which all employ the phone's accelerometer or movement sensor. For example, if you're playing the darts game, you aim the dart by tilting the phone gently from left to right and throws the dart by flicking the wrist. Flick it too softyle and you'll aim low, flick it hard and you'll aim high. It's simple to grasp, tough to master and, as a one-handed game, works perfectly on a mobile phone.

Other 'accelerometer' games such as Magic Ball, Maze, Fishing, Hammer and Homerun Derby (baseball), all employ similar gameplay principles, but all work brilliantly.

The games are so impressive that you can't help feeling that this, rather than N-Gage could be the future of mobile gaming.

LG KF750 Secret verdict

We've only given you a quick overview of this phone's capabilities, so you'll have to watch out for our full review  for the complete product rating. However, while the LG Secret is not perfect, it's without doubt the most exciting and well put together phone we've yet seen this year.