LG Secret

LG Secret Review

Phone rating:

In a nutshell: The LG Secret is a stunningly beautiful superslim phone, with carbon fibre and tempered glass giving it an aura of quality, and the touchscreen controls and "Neon Touch" visuals making it cool to use. It's a top-end phone with a 5 megapixel camera, video camera with slow motion effects, 3G video calling, a music player plus an FM radio, Bluetooth 2.0 and support for memory cards up to 4 GB. The only negatives are below average battery life and the fact that some users are reporting poor reception.
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The LG Secret KF750 is the third in LG's Black Label series - the first two being the Chocolate and the Shine. Like its predecessors, the Secret is a visually stunning phone. The Secret is touchscreen controlled, and uses "Neon Touch". Neon Touch provides a visual response to touch, so you know when you've activated a button. Watch blue lights flicker as you touch the screen - it's great fun for at least the first week of ownership! Not everyone will take to the touchscreen controls, but these kinds of phones have been around for long enough now that many people will have some previous experience of touchscreens.

It's a slide phone, and its claim to fame is that it's the slimmest 5 megapixel camera phone available. In fact at just 11.8mm, it's one of the slimmest slide phones around. Slim phones sometimes have a tendency towards screen damage, but the Secret is constructed from carbon fibre and tempered glass, so ought to be strong enough to survive reasonable amounts of abuse. Despite its slimness, its quite heavy, at 116g, but this helps to give a quality feel.

The camera is excellent, with a specification very similar to that of the excellent Viewty. It uses a 5 megapixel sensor with autofocus, and a macro mode is available for close-ups. One cool feature is "morphing", which lets you edit faces - this is similar to Sony Ericsson's very popular face warp feature. The video camera is good too, recording in Divx format at up to VGA resolution. Like the video camera in the Viewty, you can record at up to 120 frames per second, then play back at a slower rate, for a slow motion effect. The camera also supports video calls, as the Secret is a 3G phone. Another feature worth mentioning out is that the video is Divx compatible, making it easy to download movies and watch them on the phone - and with a good-sized 2.4 inch screen, this isn't as silly as it might sound.

The Secret is well equipped for music, with a music player that supports most popular file formats, as well as an FM radio. With 100 Mbytes of internal memory, you can store up to around 25 songs, but this capacity can easily be expanded by adding a microSD memory card, up to 4 Gbytes (1,000 songs.) Audio quality is high, and the phone can also play MIDI tracks with up to 72 channels.

We've noted that the phone is 3G enabled. It's actually HSDPA-enabled, with download speeds of up to 3.6 Mbps available. In addition to 3G support, it's a quadband phone, supporting GSM 900/1800/1900/2100. The phone comes with a Google package too, making it a reasonably good platform for the mobile internet.

So far so good, but there are a couple of issues that take the edge off this beauty. The first is battery life. Surprise, surprise ... it's a superslim phone and battery life is below average ... have we said this kind of thing before? It's always a trade-off: if you're a heavy user, you'd be better off avoiding superslim phones generally. The other thing is that quite a lot of our users are reporting problems with signal strength. We haven't established if this is due to any particular network, so if you do have problems, please leave a review below and say which network you're on. Other minor issues are that the screen is quite hard to read outdoors, and that ringtones can be a little quite. Apart from these issues, the Secret is a lovely phone, and packs in plenty of features too. Overall we rate it 4 stars.

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Features of the LG Secret KF750 include:

• 5 megapixel camera with autofocus, macro, 16x digital zoom and flash
• Video camera with 120 fps video recording for slow motion playback
• 3G video calling
• Display: TFT, 262,000 colours, 240 x 320 pixels (2.4 inches)
• Music player (supports MP3, AAC, AAC+, AAC++ and WMA file formats)
• FM radio
• MP3 ringtones (72 voice polyphonic)
• Messaging: SMS, EMS, MMS, Email
• Document viewer
• Voice recording
• Speakerphone
• Java games
• Memory: 100 Mbytes plus microSD memory card (up to 4 GB)
• Connectivity: Bluetooth 2.0, USB 2.0
• Internet: WAP 2.0, EDGE, HSDPA (3.6 Mbps), Google package
• Quadband
• Size: 102.8 x 50.8 x 11.8 mm
• Weight: 116g
• Battery standby: 260 hours
• Talktime: 230 minutes