LG KC910 Renoir

I’ve never found an affinity with LG mobile phones. I’m a smart phone user, and it has always appeared to me, looking from my viewpoint, that LG phones are designed for the mainstream. People who like a few features on their phone, a nice bit of styling but not much more. My opinion changed when I started reading the spec sheet for the LG KC910 Renoir. This handset is simply loaded with an amazing array of features, that wouldn’t look out of place on any smart phone.

The first thing you notice about the LG Renoir is the screen. The screen is huge, in mobile terms, clocking a 3 inch TFT, with 200 x 400 pixels and supporting up to 256,000 colours. Holding the LG Renoir in the hand, the phone feels balanced, and measures in at 108mm long, 56mm wide but surprisingly slim at just 14mm.

With such a well featured handset, it is often not easy to know where to start from, but with the Renoir there is one outstanding feature, and that is the 8 megapixel camera. When it comes to camera phones the megapixel count is not the be all and end all when it comes to picture quality. Just as important to this are the lens on the camera, the sensor and processor used and the software that the phone uses. But what 8 megapixels does is allows you to zoom in to the detail of the taken picture, and the quality will be good enough to view on a PC screen, on a web site or blog, and for printing out.

To help with picture quality, the LG Renoir has some excellent features in its camera setup. First, the phone has a Xenon flash, which should offer excellent picture quality even in low light situations. Then there is face detection, an image stabiliser and even blink detection. The camera also supports auto focus, with a manual focus option, and the option to touch the screen where you want the focus to be, too. As the Renoir also comes complete with GPS, pictures can be ‘geo-tagged’. Geo tagging allows you to record the location of where a picture was taken. When the picture is uploaded to one of the many picture hosting sites on the web, this information can be seen by those viewing the pictures. If you are on holiday and take a picture of a nice view, it would be very simple for someone viewing your picture to find the location the shot was taken from, allowing them to maybe visit the place themselves.

As well as a high quality still camera, the Renoir is also equipped with an excellent video recording facility. The LG Renoir can record videos at VGA resolution, up to 30 frames per second. There is also an option for widescreen 640 x 384 video recording and you can also record in high speed QVGA at 120fps. The Renoir supports video playback in Xvid and AVI formats, and playback is smooth and crisp. It is unfortunate that the video player cannot use the Dolby Sound enhancement option, which is for the music player only. The handset has support for a TV OUT connection. With this you can view videos and pictures from the phone directly onto a TV. One way to keep the relatives on their toes at Christmas; you can record in clear crisp detail as Auntie Mable unwraps her gifts, Uncle Joe hits the sherry, the kids start arguing over their presents and Mum throws a fit at Dad for not helping with the dinner! All you need to do is play that back on the TV and embarrass them into silence so you can snooze in front of the TV whilst the Queen’s speech is on.

Away from the camera and video, the LG Renoir is a fully capable, multi connection high end handset. There is quad band GSM support with 3G and HSDPA connectivity to boot. The HSDPA is of the newer high speed 7.2Mbps, and is more than capable for downloading songs and video clips from the internet. Just make sure you have a good data package from your network, and know the limits. To compliment your networks own data offering, there is support for WiFi, 802.11b/g, allowing you to log on to the many hotspots offered in café’s, bars and restaurants, and of course you can also connect the Renoir to your own home network. Connectivity is further boosted with support for Bluetooth 2.0 which allows you to listen to music from the handset with a compatible Bluetooth wireless headset. The GPS connectivity has already been mentioned; together with the aGPS support you can use the handset as a SatNav device.

With all that connectivity available, you can be sure the Renoir is built for web. You can view all your favourite websites on the large 3 inch screen, and using the built in accelerometer everything can be viewed in landscape mode. The handset has a built in Email client, so you can download your emails out and about. Text message entry is via an on screen QWERTY keyboard.

Memory allocation on the handset is a fairly generous 100MB, which is expandable with Micro SD memory cards. The Renoir can easily support up to 8GB, allowing plenty of room for music, videos and photos.

Overall the LG KC910 Renoir is a high end fully featured handset, designed to capture the imagination of a variety of phone users, from the techy-geek down to those who want a quality camera and mobile phone combined. A few 8 megapixel camera’s have been announced recently, as well as the LG we have the Sony Ericsson C905, Samsung i8510 INNOV8 and Samsung M8800 Pixon. It is going to be interesting to see which captures the imagination of the public.

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