The KF700 is the latest phone to combine the slider function with touch screen. In this phone, however, the entire top section is one touchable screen. This is an interesting change, but the question is, does it really add anything to using the phone, or is it simply a cool gimmick?
The front of the phone features a 3 inch, 262k pixel screen with all the touch screen functions. Unlike the KF600, there are no dividers, no touch sections. The entire screen is touchable. It’s frustrating that the phone has a 5mm border around the edge of the screen; that feels like room that could have been used. But aside from that wasted screen real estate, the entire front of the phone is touchable.
The slider reveals a standard keypad, with the standard red and green call buttons and the “C” which LG phones use to delete characters in text messages. The keypad does not feel as high-quality as the rest of the phone, but the phone overall feels sturdy and usable.
The touch screen offers haptics, and works well, except that you have to keep the phone locked to keep from opening menus with your ear while you’re talking. This is an annoying non-feature. In general, users will use the lock function more often than they would expect, to avoid bumping the touchscreen and setting off some feature of the phone.
The dedicated camera button and lock are located on the side of the phone. A control dial and OK button are designed to navigate through the phone, but are poorly positioned and do not function as well as they should. However, the dial also acts as a volume control in the music player, which is quite useful. And because of the touch screen, there is no d-pad, so the dial and buttons are more important.
This is bad because they just don’t work that well. The idea is that the dial and buttons allow users to navigate quickly around the phone. The reality is that the phone’s navigation consists of buttons, dials, and on-screen icons. The icons change as the user moves around the menus, and it’s not always clear what to do to get a particular menu option.
One complete navigation system with easy-to-use controls would be a major improvement. The 3-megapixel camera, good texting quality, and external microSD slot make this phone more usable, but overall, it’s poorly designed and fails to live up to its own hype. The navigation problems alone make the phone frustrating and difficult to use.
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