LG Renoir eight-megapixel cameraphone

Serious alternative to the you-know-what

By Phil Lattimore • Get more from this author

11th November 2008 13:02 GMT

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The smooth black front is dominated by the 3in display, a 240 x 400, 262,000-colour touchscreen that’s smaller and less detailed than the Apple one.

Round the back, the camera lens protrudes just a few millimetres from smooth graphite-grey surface. LG has ditched the Viewty’s round-the-lens zoom control for a more conventional rocker key. Around the lens is a sliding cover.

Pressing the main menu button pulls up a side bar of four sub menu category icons

The smart-looking front and back panels are covered by sheets of glossy plastic which are typically smudge-attracting. A small low-res video-call camera sits anonymously above the Renoir’s screen, while three control buttons are arranged below the display – regular Call and End buttons, plus a key for calling up a list of currently running applications.

The LG Renoir is built around a UI to that's like the one used on previous LG touchscreen phones. There have been improvements and enhancements along the way, and the new one feels a more responsive. Scrolling is smoother, for instance, and flicking through lists more fluid.

Haptic feedback lets you know when buttons have been properly pressed - levels for this vibrating feedback can be adjusted. The Renoir’s UI doesn't deliver quite the easy user-friendliness and slickness of the iPhone, but it does the job.

The home screen has a row of four icons along the bottom for phone dialing, the contacts book, messaging and the main menu. Above and to the right of them, there’s a small ‘W’ that pulls up a toolbar of widgets at the bottom of the screen, representing a limited selection of applications you can have on your home screen: music player, FM radio, photo gallery, clocks, calendar, notes, speed dialing and an Accuweather online weather forecast.