LG Secret (KF750): more than meets the eye

The centrepiece of LG’s latest splashy ad campaign, the Secret KF750, is the newest phone to be released under the company’s premium Black Label Series. At first glance, it’s easily mistaken for a phone that’s all looks and no substance, but there’s a lot more to the Secret than meets the eye.

An eclectic mix of chrome, tempered glass, faux leather, carbon fibre and rubberised plastic should by all rights look like a horrible mish-mash on a mobile, but LG has managed to pull it all off with the Secret, giving it a very distinctive and elegant appearance. It’s also got a nice heft to it, despite its sleek 11.8mm thickness, which only adds to the impression of it being a premium handset.

The spring-loaded slider opens and closes with a satisfying click, revealing a flat keypad with large buttons and excellent tactile feedback. LG has opted for a virtual touchpad in favour of the traditional four-way controller, although the select and call keys are still the usual mechanical buttons. Pressing any of the virtual buttons results in a small vibration to simulate a tactile sensation.

The virtual buttons look fancy, but they’re not as responsive as a physical controller and frequently lag behind when you’re trying to scroll through a list quickly. But this is a complaint that applies to the entire operating system, which we found to be sluggish in general. Turning off the animated home screen and fancy system sounds speeds it up a little – and you’re going to want to do the latter anyway, as the chirpy tones for keypad and touchpad input are juvenile.

The LG Secret is one of the few DivX-certified phones on the market, and we were thoroughly impressed with its video playback. It wouldn’t play any of our XviD-encoded movies – nor some of our DivX files, for that matter – but it got along famously with an episode of Californication without having to resort to the bundled DivX Mobile Converter desktop software. If you’re used to the jittery, frame-challenged experience of trying to watch downloaded movies and TV shows on a mobile phone, you’ll be blown away by the buttery smoothness of the LG Secret’s DivX playback. It only comes with 100MB of shared memory, but it supports microSDHC cards up to 16GB.

LG also throws in a Touch Media application for managing music, photos, games and documents, as well as a shortcut to the FM radio, with a handy button on the right-hand side for launching the program directly. We were surprised to find that videos weren’t included in the application, but even more surprising is that Touch Media turns the Secret’s 2.4-in display into a touchscreen, letting you tap directly on the screen to play the different media types. Why LG didn’t offer up the touchscreen function full-time is beyond us.

Another button on the right-hand side launches the Secret’s five-megapixel camera, and we were pleased with the quality of the photos and videos. There aren’t any fancy name brand lenses or Xenon flashes on-board here, but there are lots of other features to keep snap-happy users satisfied, like auto-focus, multiple scene modes, options for panorama and continuous shots, and adjustable ISO (up to 800) and white balance. Photos in natural lighting looked fantastic, with bright and accurate colour tones and plenty of crisp detail. Low-light shots aren’t so good, despite its inclusion of a powerful flash; we found it struggled to maintain focus and noise levels were high. The Secret can also record video in DivX at 30 and 120 frames per second, the latter being for producing slow-motion video clips.

The Secret isn’t so strong on the business end of things. It offers HSDPA but no Wi-Fi, and both the web browser and email (of which only one POP3 or IMAP4 account is supported at a time) are ponderously slow to use. One email with 100KB of attachments took two-and-a-half minutes to download and display. Still, it can open Office and PDF files using the pre-loaded Picsel viewer, which is more than we can say for most non-smartphones.