I’m nearing the end of the 18-month O2 contract I took out with my Viewty. With new technology reaching obsolescence after only a short life, why post about something that is so old?

Because when the Viewty first came out, people seemed to be falling over each other trying to be the first to review the phone. They hadn’t used it in anger. And boy, this phone makes me angry. When people ask me “is it a good phone?”, I struggle not to begin ranting. It is still widely available, so if I cause just one person to stop and reconsider the purchase of a Viewty, I will consider this post to be worthwhile.

The technical details, pictures, and many reviews of people singing the Viewty’s praises are everywhere. Just google it. I’m going to skip all of that rubbish, and tell you why you should have stuck with Sony Ericsson.

The interface

It’s a touch screen phone, and so has a larger-than-usual display on a phone of its size, because of the lack of hard keys on the front. There are three, in fact – Call, Delete, and Hang Up. The touch screen is slow to respond, however, and often unresponsive; this may be due to the membrane being of a more rugged design to withstand contact with keys, coins, and other pocket content, but it results in a lot of frustration.

The Viewty gives positive feedback in the form of a brief vibration when pressing any of the soft keys, which is so completely necessary to save the phone from being unusable I don’t understand why there is an option to disable the feedback altogether.

A stylus is included, and it has an interesting design. It’s a liptick-like thing, with the narrow stylus point retracting into the stubby grip given enough pressure. It doesn’t attach to the phone any any way other than looping the stylus cord through an attachment on the corner of the phone – a traditional long narrow stylus, with a corresponding slot in the body of the phone, would have been much more user friendly. Not wanting to have to carry the lipstick-stylus around with me, I’ve always used my finger to use the phone – maybe contributing to my finding it difficult to use.

My HP iPaq, of much older design than the Viewty, has a touch screen which far outclasses that of the Viewty, and doesn’t even give any kind of positive feedback. And its stylus is shorter than the Viewty is long — it would easily fit inside the Viewty case, if there was a slot for it — so I really fail to see why the lipstick stylus was ever considered a good idea.

Writing a text message is average. Unlike phones with hard keys there’s no physical boundary between the different soft keys, so you can’t feel the ‘home keys’ and even with the positive feedback you can’t tell if you’ve accidentally pressed the wrong key or not. Oh, and the backspace key is the Delete hard key, which requires much more force to press than the soft keys, and often means you need to readjust your grip slightly. And trying to position your cursor without the stylus is just pot luck.

Camera

It’s average, even though I bought the phone on the strength of the advert which concentrated on the camera as a selling point. It has an image stabiliser (which is activated with the lock button – yes, wtf?) but I don’t use it. The video camera is ok, and although it can shoot movies at 120fps, any such movies will only play back on the phone at

There is a sliding three-position selector to change the camera mode between still shots, movies, and camera album mode. This just adds to the delay in getting the phone ready to take a snap – the software takes a few seconds to load, and if you activate the wrong mode, e.g. movie instead of stills, you’ll miss your shot.

The camera album mode displays thumbnails of your movies and pictures at 8 or so per page. Changing pages takes forever, and finding a particular picture to show someone invariable leads that someone to get bored and ask you not to bother.

Scrolling and zooming

Ah yes, I nearly forgot. Scrolling through menus, and zooming in on the subject of a photo, is simply infuriating. There’s a spring-loaded zoom ring around the camera lense, which is used for both the camera zoom and menu scrolling. When scrolling, you operate the ring with your off-hand index finger – but the spring is so stiff that it’s impossible to quickly select the option you are looking for. And when zooming, you are supposed to use the edge of your left 2nd finger to operate it – careful, don’t get your zoom-finger in shot – but it feels like you would be better off using your thumb, and holding the phone in a cack-handed way.

You can also opt to scroll through menus by touching and dragging – but without using the stylus it’s very hit and miss as to whether you successfully scroll, or accidentally select a random option without realising until you’re dialling someone you’ve never spoken to before.

Locking the phone

On the edge of the Viewty is a lock button, which locks the touch screen. It’s a push-button, rather than a sliding button, and so it gets accidentally pressed in pockets and when picking it up. When locked, the screen goes black showing just the time and date , and then after a few seconds a power-saving feature causes the display to go completely blank. When the phone is locked, the first press of the lock button reactivates the display to show the time and date, and the second press unlocks the phone. That’s 1 too many presses in my opinion.

There’s an autolock function, which admittedly can be disabled, but when you’re in a call and the phone autolocks, it doesn’t exhibit the usual behaviour of showing the time and date on a blank screen. Instead, it shows a tiiiiiiiny little padlock icon at the side of the screen, and actually it’s really frustrating when you’re working through an automated phone system’s options, for example, and your phone keeps locking.

Phonebook

Mobile phones have had address books, contact lists, or phonebooks (whatever you want to call them) since the beginning of time. Well, at least since my very first mobile, anyway. So you would have thought UI designers would know how people want to use them by now. Not so at LG. Sometimes, throwing away the rulebook and starting from scratch can be beneficial. Not in this case.

By default, when you press the phonebook button to access your phonebook, you’re presented with a screen which shows you the first two (by alphabet) entries in your phonebook. The rest of the screen is taken up by the keypad, allowing you to search by name. But unless you have no more than 2 people with the very same first name in your address book, you’re going to need to scroll at some point.

You can switch to a grouped view, where the names are grouped into six groups, A-D, E-H, etc, and six entries are viewable at once. But that still involves a fair amount of scrolling, and that’s very dangerous if you’re using your finger instead of the stylus.

And there’s no Sony Ericsson-style most recently used contacts to be found ANYWHERE.

Because of all this, it’s easier to reply to an existing text message than it is to start a new text message to that person, and starting a phonecall is just heart-sinkingly depressing. However, the result is that I never go over my inclusive allowance.

Voicemail

All modern phones allow you to pre-program the number for your voicemail service, and dial that number by holding down the 1 key. Ok, for a start there’s no 1 key until you press unlock twice, to unlock your phone, and then press the keypad soft key to display the keypad. It also makes your provider’s voicemail system frustrating, because when you press 2/3/4 to delete/save/whatever the message you just heard, you realise the phone was locked and your keypress wasn’t recognised. By the time you figure out why your voicemail was ignoring you and unlock your phone, you’re halfway through the next message.

And then, when you’re done listening to voicemail messages, the Viewty kindly asks you whether you want to save your voicemail number in your phonebook. Every time.

Then you throw your Viewty against a wall.

Power

My phone always seems to be fully charged but will suddenly show the 25% battery charge icon, then a few minutes later a flashing empty battery icon. A few minutes after that, the phone will turn off. No other indication. No warning sound. I can’t count the number of times I have realised my phone battery was flat, simply because I don’t have eyes in my pocket.

Alarm

You can set a handful of alarms to repeat daily, or on a set pattern, or just once. Alarms will even go off if your phone has shut down because of low power – useful if your phone dies overnight, and you have an alarm set for the morning. However, if I wanted a fully-featured alarm clock, I would have bought a fully-featured alarm clock, in the same way that I take a digital camera with me when I think I will want to take photos, instead of just using my phone.

Conclusion

It’s a rubbish phone. If you must buy one, I recommend the following mitigating actions:

1. Buy a handbag if you don’t already have one – for the stylus – otherwise your options are to tie the stylus/lipstick to the phone (like a phone-sized phone charm) or use the phone with your finger (bloody frustrating).
2. Never travel more than 10 metres away from a phone charger.
3. Buy a second (better) phone and use that instead. (Feel free to keep your Viewty in your pocket if you feel the need to put something on the table down the pub.)
4. Abstain from mobile phone usage for a few years before buying your Viewty, so that you misinformedly think it’s the best thing since interchangeable phone covers.