To borrow a term from the industry LG associates themselves with, the Shine Touch is a fashion disaster, a phone that seems to know what’s hot in smartphone trends, but is clueless in making them work. From widgets to Wi-Fi, pseudo apps to social networking, it tries to pack as many of today’s popular features into an interface so confounded and overloaded, the result is more knock-off than knock-out.

Design

The handset itself is just as LG describes it, slim and slender. Carrying on the design esthetics of LG’s previous, and very successful, Shine phones, the new Touch model has a light-catching metallic body, a mirrored finish, and a beveled form that’s made for caressing. Slim side-buttons jut out from edges like ribs to offer volume, music, power, and camera controls while home, call, and hang-up functions are placed just below the screen as touch-controls. Physically, the Shine Touch is attractive and simple.

Touch Controls

With a small phone comes a small screen and that’s trouble for any device that hopes to do a lot with touch controls. The screen is 3” diagonal, but most of that is length, not width. Of the many handsets I’ve tested, this display has proven the least resilient against sunlight. The screen completely washes out, practically becoming a mirror in daylight.

The touch controls lack Apple’s pinch and zoom gestures, instead offering only movements that can be performed with one finger – tapping, pressing, swiping, and scrolling, meaning you need to use scroll bars to zoom, controls I often found to small to use well. Tapping icons often requires repeated attempts and sometimes a keypress can become stuck, repeating itself. A vibrational feedback triggers a rattle and hum from the phone when you successfully activate an icon to help with user accuracy, but I found it distracting.

An onscreen QWERTY keyboard will only appear when the phone is turned sideways for landscape mode and while it’s a bit cramped, it does the basic job. In portrait mode you’re given a keypad where you have to press each key continually to cycle through letter options, it’s a slow process. You can engage the T9 shortcut system if that helps. Finally you can use a handwriting box where you can draw out letters using your finger. The drawing space isn’t very large, making it a difficult solution to use.

Widgets And Apps

Similar to what Google offers with their Android phones, the Shine Touch uses three home screens. By swiping your finger across the screen you can shift from one to the next. The main screen acts as a mobile desktop allowing you to add widgets for quick reference such as a clock, photo album, calendar, sticky note pad, etc. The selection of widgets is good, but unlike Android phones, the screen doesn’t have enough landscape to use more than a couple without cluttering up the display.

The second home screen offers Polaroid-shaped icons to represent each of your contacts, with the option to quickly call or message that person.

The last screen offers a system LG calls “Live Square” which features animated avatars for the six contacts you communicate with most. When a person sends you a text message or an e-mail, their avatar shows a message bubble over their head. Tapping the avatar takes you to the message. You can customize each avatar with a range of character heads and body types.

The idea is to offer an overview of your incoming messages from multiple contacts and because you can drag-and-select multiple avatars at once, to make it easy to send out messages to a group. It’s a cute and novel system, designed more for entertainment value than practical use.

LG doesn’t have an App market in the same way that Apple, RIM, and Google offer. Instead they have taken inspiration from those companies to organize the Shine Touch’s features and downloads in a similar way.

A menu screen offers four rows of app-like icons, each representing phone features such as the camera, voice recorder, web browser, etc. Each row offers a specific category – communication, entertainment, utilities, and settings and you can swipe each row to move through the different icons. As a menu system I found it jarring to the eyes, every icon has the same stark black, white, and red contrast and trying to swipe through the selections is difficult.

Rogers provides a store through their network for downloads including music, ringtones, games, and this is used by LG to deliver a small selection of java-powered programs for streaming music, XM radio etc. Their “Pocket Apps” offer cute, quick time wasters. Mellow Candle lets you create virtual candles and cakes to blow out while Banner lets you create a large, animated message for your screen to hold up and show at public events.

Included are applications for Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter. While all three offer well-organized menus and features to access your accounts, I found them sluggish in performance, taking too long to load screens, and slow, almost resistant in scrolling down through feeds.

Multi-Tasking, Copy & Paste

To LG’s credit the Shine Touch has two features many smartphones lack; multi-tasking and copy and paste. You can run multiple applications at once and, while the Shine Touch may not be a powerhouse, it doesn’t feature many sophisticated apps so you can get away with having a few open without slowing the phone’s performance. You can select text from one a web page, for example, and insert it into an e-mail using the input text mode. It’s not an elegant solution, but it’s possible.

Web Browsing And Connections

Where the Shine stumbles badly is in web surfing. The browser converts web pages into a more text-based mobile version that is sluggish to scroll through. This is too bad. While the Shine Touch is not a 3G phone, it connects to the internet using Rogers’ 2G EDGE, it is a quad-band handset making it friendly for travel and does include Wi-Fi which is the faster connection and would make web browsing worthwhile.

Multimedia

Here the Shine Touch improves, delivering a 3MP camera that can speed-shoot up to nine shots at once, offers a range of photo effects and adjustments and a video recording mode.

Music playback is perhaps the Shine Touch’s best feature. With Dolby Mobile sound music sounds better than what most smartphones offer and with a Micro-SD card you can add up to 16 GB of memory to transform it into a worthwhile MP3 player.

All Body No Brains

The LG Shine Touch is a physically attractive handset with the right hardware in the right places for snapping pics and playing hot tracks, but in software tries too hard to play at being a smartphone and the result is confusing, dizzy, and awkward.

 

The LG Shine Touch KM555 is available through Rogers for $49.99 on a three-year contract, $249.99 at no term.