A lot of good things happen when you get down to the essentials. Clean out your clutter, and you get more work done. Take out the non-functional fins and extravagant, swoopy bodywork of earlier cars, and you get modern vehicular design that’s sleek and sexy. Distill barley, or hops, or some other boring grain – and you get the best liquid consumable ever invented. And when it comes to cellphones, the same thing applies many times over – as demonstrated by the LG KC910 Renoir.

“Distillation” is the key word here – LG has taken what’s important in both physical cellphone and user interface magic and combined them into a phone that seems to cover all the important aspects of convenience and usability, without confusing the heck out of the user at the same time (this is coming from a Windows Mobile user who needed a couple of tries to get everything to work on his newly acquired WM 6.1 – equipped cellphone). Sticking to the essentials is certainly a good plan for LG, but in the process of distillation there’s been some compromises seemingly made and some somewhat shoddy implementations done on the way to the Renoir’s official release.

The clear hard-buttons look durable - akin to the PSP's control keys. These won't be wearing out anytime soon.

It's not very visible in this shot, but the Renoir's backplate is lined with circular ridges that create a "rippling" effect - a nice change from the usual blank plastic.

Let’s cover the physical first: I have no complaints on the Renoir’s physique; a medium-sized profile (too slim and I feel the phone is too delicate to cram into a jeans pocket) but not heavy at all at 114g, the Renoir has enough heft to avoid making it feel cheap. It only comes in one color: black, but what an interesting combination of textures! The front is as expected with its glossy and reflective screen, but the rear texturing looks like some kind of old-style prism, or perhaps a miniaturized vinyl record, containing hundreds of circular lines that radiate from the camera-lens protrusion. It makes for a great change from the usual plain plastic and is not too susceptible to smudges to boot. Silver trim surround the device, nearer the top or “screen” portion of the device.

The lock button and camera button are placed on the right side of the device.

Volume buttons on the same side also function as camera zoom buttons.

Call, end, and a multifunctional “menu” button line the bottom front of the device, while a chrome-lined speaker alongside the ambient light sensor and the front mounted camera are placed near the top. The rear as mentioned holds the 8 MP camera, complete with a protruding camera lens-cover that can be opened manually. Beside it is a xenon flash unit, plus an alternate focus light. Some cool logos line the bottom portion of the device. The left side of the device holds the microSD and combination power/data/sound jack slots, while the right side plays host to the dedicated camera button, lock/unlock key, and volume buttons. The whole unit feels chunky especially when comparing it to a couple of recent review units, such as LG’s own Cookie, Samsung’s Omnia, and the budget Samsung M3510. It’s no big deal for me for reasons stated above, but potential buyers will want to look out whether it fits their lifestyle and their pants pocket.

A page in the "Communications" tab. This particular page also has a shortcut key in the "Home" screen.

The four main tabs can be seen here: “Communicate”, “Entertainment”,  “Utilities”, and “Settings” tabs, from top to bottom.

Now, on to the interface. The “distillation” introduction of this blog entry applies especially to this section, as it is actually the end-product of LG’s own Flash UI from the Renoir’s predecessor the Viewty, and a compilation of other user interfaces’ useful features. As with a lot of phones currently available, there’s a flavor of Windows Mobile in the user interface, without the tiny icons of course. But Flash UI is much more simplified, and all the more usable for it, than Windows Mobile, or most other user interfaces for that matter. The main menu , accessible from the “Home” screen that also holds the call, address book, messaging, and widgets selection shortcuts, drills down to four main pages, namely the “Communicate”, “Entertainment”,  “Utilities”, and “Settings” tabs. Each hold applicable icons, such as messaging, email, contacts and dialing for the communicate tab, gallery, camera, music and games for the entertainment tab, browser, voice recorder alarms and organizer for utilities, and Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, screen and phone settings in the settings tab.

The small "w" at the bottom right opens the widgets list, where you can drag out your desired icons.

Here we see a number of widgets, now out on the "Home" screen for easy access.

Over and above these simplified tabs, LG has added a somewhat uninspired “Widgets” section which reminds me of the LG Cookie’s implementation – select from a pre-defined list of widgets and drag to the main screen for easy access. The main screen can be scrolled down if you have too many widgets to fit into the 3.0” screen, and the widgets can be moved manually. Each widget is useful and looks neat, but I lament the lack of customization and a neat feature found on the Cookie: shaking the phone while in its widget select-and-drag mode will make the icons all line up with the help of the accelerometer. While I’m nit-picking, I’ll also mention that the Renoir, a wholly more advanced and expensive phone than the Cookie, does not have the HTC-like “flip” function to move from one page to the other – these aren’t essential to using the phone, but that’s why it’s called nit-picking, and that’s why I started this entry with the “essentials”.

Customize the middle "favorites" button to display your most commonly-used apps.

Open more than 3 apps, like this Java-based game, and the Renoir starts to slow down noticeably.

The aforementioned “Home” keys cannot be customized either, although to be fair, this is what someone like me will be needing to press 95% of the time. Also surmounting this is the hardware “favorites” key that accesses a customizable menu screen where you can place up to 9 of your most commonly used apps. The same button leads to the “Task Manager” screen, where you can see all of your running applications and shut down each or go to a specific one any time – an important feature as LG’s “distillation” to the essentials of a cellphone also reached to processing power – open more than 3 applications at the same time and you face noticeable slowdowns. This is with a fresh phone with a minimal number of contacts, pictures and notes cluttering up memory, I can imagine performance getting worse as time goes on due to its low power ARM9 processor with a maximum speed of 140Mhz.

A few more screens from the Renoir interface: here we see "My Stuff" - for all your media and documents.

An "Appointment" page serves as this phone's "PDA" feature.

Before we look at phone specifications however, I need to cover some more important aspects of the Renoir’s interface: the top “Status Bar” functions as a one-touch access to essential phone stats, including time, network, battery life, memory status, user profile, and the status of the main connectivity components Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. And also important to note: try as I might, I could not find the “Picsel” document viewer application mentioned in many other online previews of the phone, nor could I find the MAC address sometimes required in setting up connectivity to a MAC-filter enabled network. In the end however, these nitpicks and complaints cannot surmount the fact that all of the buttons are easy to actuate, logical in placement, and covers 99% of a cellphone user’s needs for convenient access to the device’s many functions, and does so without undue drama or more than 3 levels of drilling down menus. That’s a well-designed, if somewhat sparse interface right there, folks.

Texting on this touchscreen phone is great, as long as you look at what you're doing.

Looking for a name and calling someone is a cinch - browse through your contacts either by inputting numbers or fragments of the stored name.

Ok, specifications wise, we’ve already covered the central component of the cellphone, at least in the opinion of this PC-addicted reviewer: the processor. An ARM9-class 140MHz proc for a multi-function phone like this? C’mon. This makes it look like the Task Manager is there just so that the user can quickly close down apps and free up resources to avoid slowing down the device. A hundred MB of internal memory can be expanded using the hot-swappable microSD slot – up to 16GB of memory goodness, if you so desire. Internal memory cannot be accessed when connecting the phone to your PC though. The resistive touchscreen, a standard 240 x 320 resolution, 3.0" unit, coupled with smart programming and the aforementioned “essential” interface, makes this one of the best touchscreen phones for texting, especially if you’re like me and grew up with the touch-texting friendly Nokia 5110 and similar. Just enough pressure, as accorded by the resistive screen, is needed for each letter, and the large letters ensure minimal typos. The haptic feedback helps too of course – and is also present when scrolling down menus and accessing each icon. The battery is an adequate 1000mAh unit – official standby and talk hours are 264 and three respectively, but I noticed that this got cut down quite quickly when using the camera and Wi-Fi.

The manually-actuated lens cover is a fitting design element for the capable camera.

A sample pic taken with the Renoir during low-light conditions.

This lets us segue nicely to the heart of this review: the 8 MP camera equipped with Schneider – Kreuznach lens, with a xenon flash for company. Putting aside all of the official numbers, features, software enhancements and whatnot, this camera’s performance in low-light conditions is simply phenomenal for a cameraphone. I have some examples of its performance when this same review unit was used to capture part of HP’s printer launch event – peep it here – but what’s striking is the fact that the camera could even resolve anything in that light. The 8MP rating certainly helps, as does the xenon flash, but it is certainly down to better optics than most previous camera phones that can result in such passable (for the first time) performance in low-light. If you’re only looking for a cellphone for the primary purpose of being prepared to snap away almost anytime, then you can safely ignore the previous paragraphs, as this is one of the best cameras on a cellphone I’ve encountered, including the N95, which has long held my “seal of approval” when it comes to camera performance.

Multimedia cred. Note the backplate texture.

The Java dice game makes use of the unit's accelerometer.

Let’s see, there’s only a few more points to cover – on the specifications front, answering calls reveal adequate volume and clarity, but the speakerphone is downright poor – tinny and prone to breaking up, but then again it might just be our test unit. Using earphones give a pretty good experience however. Support for Dolby Mobile and DivX give this cellphone multimedia cred, while the included games (a spinning wheel game and dice games) are fun, but underline the weak processing power by stuttering along even without other applications running in the background.

The left side hosts the power/data socket and the hot-swap microSD slot.

Parting Shot.

All in all, the LG Renoir holds true to the tenet of KISS – the essentials are all there, but something that could have improved the user experience, or made the cellphone more dynamic, might have slipped through the cracks in the process of distilling the features to the essentials. It is also unfortunate that the process of distillation was also applied to processing power – just enough for basic use. The phone during its tenure with me was still snappy when taking pictures, scrolling through contacts, or sifting through the gallery, but loading up more than three apps, or playing the included java-based games reveals the dastardly under-performing core. The camera performance is very good though – more than enough in my opinion to overcome the many nit-picks I have for this device – and that after all is the heart of the matter – LG kept everything to the essentials, but poured more effort into its camera development – and that’s a good thing. There’s a reason why this phone is named “Renoir”, and it’s essentially because it’s a camera at heart.