It may have an 8MP camera but what does that matter if the UI was squeezed out of a dog's behind?

Having been stuck with an LG Viewty on 3 network for the last 12 months I'd be reluctant to get another LG phone.

The Viewty hardware was and still is a good bit of hardware, but there remain a number of really annoying and well documented firmware issues that LG never addressed.

I got the impression that the Viewty was rushed out the door to be ready for Christmas last year and rather than providing any real support LG just moved on to their next handset.

So despite the Renoir ticking all the latest hardware boxes, my next handset will be a Jesus phone when my current contract runs out in 6 months time.

.. it's got all the same problems as my old Viewty, inconsistent UI, over-compressed imaging, hopeless multi-tasking, poor multimedia player, promises that glitches will be fixed in "an update" etc etc.

The Viewty was the first phone I ever PAID to get out of a contract to get away from... Never another LG phone as long as I live. All they're interested in is being able to boast bigger numbers for each feature, no thought to the end-user experience. And if you find a bug, tough, LG are too busy looking at their next great handset to be bothered going back and fixing the issue...

a long article, not to badly written, how ever. What about its spec?, how does it compair to other 8MP phones? like the samsung, i found the other comments very intresstig as i am in the market.

The samsung 8510 comes with 8Gb internal and upto 16Gb cards (which are about £40 each atm).

What codecs does the vieaty thingy support?, can it charge off a standard usb port.

So on top of that, 8MP is not really all that awsome that it can not be compaired to 5Mp phones.

/rant

I don't want to tar this phone with memories of its predecessor, but I got the 5MP Viewty and sold it a week later on eBay because of its dodgy firmware, reverting back to my 3.2MP Sony k850. The firmware was apallingly clumsy, the camera shots looked a lot more washed out than the k850, and it didn't have bluetooth audio streaming (well it never worked). They lost my trust and I doubt I'd look at this one.

Not wanting to put anyone off, but I'd definitely try before you buy.

... one of these to replace my excellent Viewty... a phone that I've had no trouble with whatsoever (well I did break the screen) some of the limtations are bit bizzarre... like only 300 texts messages can be stored at anyone time. But I'd have to say that the firmware is currently on revision G which rather gives the lie to the "being rushed out and forgotton" comment.

The renoir is a good loking phone and the demo model I played with the other day was excellent.

Call me geeky, but I might have liked to find out what O/S it runs, what processor, memory etc, so that I could work out whether it was suitable for running my applications...

But what about the Voyager? Similar phone with a QWERTY keyboard - reviewed a year ago and never arrived on these shores.

It's just an 8mp cameraphone (probably with a tiny sensor to it will be horribly compressed and worse than a decent 5mp sensor), not a smartphone.

A-GPS doesn't use satellites. Unlike vanilla GPS, A-GPS uses phone masts to determine it's location. Can we please decide whether we are talking about GPS or A-GPS here?

Facually incorrect.

GPS uses some fancy maths to work out where it is in relation to certain GPS System (RAS Syndrome?) satellites, based on the delay between sending by the satellite and reception by the device. Devices overhead will be closer than those at other angles to the location, so the GPS receiver can work out where it is from comparing the delay from several sources.

A-GPS makes this easier by downloading the appropriate information based on the location of the nearest Cell over a data connection. This makes the guesswork / mathwork of the GPS receiver take far less time, as it already has reference information for where satellites SHOULD be relative to its (approximate) current position. It can also allow the device to approximate what a GPS signal SHOULD be telling it if the signal drops, allowing for better connectivity within buildings and under cover (to a certain extent).