LG Shine KE970 Review - Multimedia
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Richard Baguley Published on April 25, 2007 Comment on this |
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Accessing Music Software (7.4)
Thanks to the dedicated MP3 button the side of the KE970, accessing the music player software took just 2.8 seconds; allw e ahd to do was to slide the phone ope, then pres the button and wait for a second or so while the software started up. This can be even quicker if you use the wired remote that comes with the phone; pressing the play button has the same effect as the MP3 button.
Dedicated Music Controls (16.0) The MP3 button is the only dedicated music control on the phone itself, but the wired remote includes 7 dedicated buttons; a hold silder, fast forward and rewind, plus a play/pause button, a stop button and a small volume control on the bottom. This is a nice touch; it makes controlling the music a lot easier if the phone is in a bag or coat pocket. The wired remote also has a microphone and a standard 3.5-mm headphone socket, so you can use your normal headphones and still make and receive calls.
Music Software Functionality and Organization (1.0)
While the wired remote is well designed and easy to use, the built-in music socftware is not. It is extremely basic and is a pain to use. For one thing, it can’t play music from the memory card; it only detects music in the music folder of the internal memory of the phone. If you want to play music on a MicroSD card, youhave to go into the My Stuff application, then navigate to the memory card and play the music from there.
The MP3 software also does not support any of the common playlist formats, and you can’t create playlists on the phone. All it can do is to play every file in the phone memory in order. About the onlu good thing in there is the prescence of an equalizer, but this is a mixed blessing; it has 10 presets, but no way to create your own. This poor music software seems like a curious thing to us; why did LG build a phone with a decent wired remote, then put MP3 software on there that is practically unusable? About the only feature that we like is that you can use any MP3 file as a ringtone by selecting the “set as ringtone” option from the menu. Online Song Downloading (0.0)
There is no support for any online song downloading service. This is not perhaps surprising, as the KE970 is an unlocked phone, and most of the online music download services are connected to a specific carrier.
Streaming (0.0)
We were unable to get any online music streaming services to work with the KE970; it lacks the carrier specific services some phones have, and the built in web browser was unable to work with the links from several online radio stations that we tried.
Podcast Support (0.0)
No direct support is provided for downloading and playing podcasts. If you want to listen to podcasts on this phone, you’ll have to download them manually and copy them over using the synching application.
Music Sync with PC (4.0)
LG supplies their own synching software with the KE970, but it does not handle music; you have to convert files to the appropriate format yourself. Copying fils to the phone is a question of simply dragging and dropping them into the music folder on the appropriate drive. Unusually, both the memory card and the phone’s internal memory appear as drives on the PC when you connect it via the USB cable.
Music Formats and DRM (0.0)
The KE970 supports music in MP3, AAC and AAC+ format. However, there are limitations here; variable bitrate MP3s are not supported, and the AAC files are limited to 48kbps bitrates. If you’ve encoded your files to anything higher, you’ll have to reconvert them.
Music Interruption (5.0)
The KE970 did a middling job in this test: music was paused when a call came in, but it was not resumed afterwards; we had to hit the play button to get back to our tunes.
Video
Video Software Access (2.67)
The KE970 does not have a specific video application; if you want to watch a video captured by the phone, you have to go into the camcorder application and then into the album. If you want to watch a video you have uploaded, you have to go to the folder that the video file is in and select play. The latter process (which is what we use for our testing) is a lengthy process; we found that it took 7.4 seconds to go from the standby state to the video starting to play, most of which was taken up by navigating through the menus to get to the files.
Video Controls (8.0)
The same controls that are used for audio are used for video – specific buttons are mapped for play/pause, fast forward, rewind. The buttons on the wired remote can also be used, but they are less useful for video than they are for audio.
Video Software & Organization (2.0)
Much like the music software, the video software is very basic. You get the basic controls (play/stop, fast forward, etc) but no way to create playlists or otherwise manage the video. The video itself is presented in a postage stamp sized section of the screen, irrespective of the size of the video. There is no way to switch this to a full screen view or change the orientation to watch in landscape mode; the small screen is all you get. As far as video organization, quite simply, there isn’t any. The only organization you get is the ability to copy or delete files, which is probably what you’ll be looking to do after you try and watch them on the KE970.
Video Sync with PC (0.0)
LG’s basic synching software does not support converting video for viewing on the KE970. Fortunately, there are several good cheap or free software packages that can do this, but that’s not as good as having one that comes with the device.
Video Formats (3.0)
The only format the KE970 was capable of playing back was 3GP; it refused to play Windows Media, Real or Flash video files. It also refused to play back MPEG 4 video files; although the player showed the existence of the files, it them refused to play them back, claiming the file type was not supported.
Video DRM (0.0)
None of the common video copy protection schemes are supported by the KE970. So, video downloaded from iTunes or other similar services won’t work on this phone.
Video Playback Smoothness
We use a variety of test files encoded at different bit rates to test video smoothness, but the KE970 had a problem with all of them; even the smallest and lowest bitrate of our test files (which start at 24kbps) was jerky and almost unwatchable.
Online Video Downloading (0.0)
The KE970 doesn’t support any of the common video downloading services.
Video Streaming unscored
You’ll probably be able to guess this one, but the KE970 didn’t work with any of the video streaming sites that we tried it with.
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