LG KE970-Shine Review - Introduction & Design

LG's KE970 "Shine" is one of the most gorgeous mobile phones - nay, one of the most gorgeous handheld objects - I've ever come across.  I drooled over it at CES in Vegas this past January, and again at CTIA in Orlando in March.  I tend to favor a combination of features and style in my gadgets, but from the moment I first saw Shine's TFT display emerge from beneath it's mirrored front panel, I was in love.  It almost didn't matter what Shine had under the hood - I wanted to be near its beauty. 

Thanks to Corey from MobilePlanet  www.mobileplanet.com , I got to be up close and personal with Shine for a few weeks.  I got the unlocked GSM KE970 version (LG recently introduced a 3G-enabled version, the KU970), which wasn't meant for North American soil but works just fine with a T-Mobile or Cingular SIM card, provided you're not in a 850 MHz only service area.   

From its mirrored front to brushed silver rear and side panels, and from its luxurious metal construction to solid sliding mechanism, Shine screams "quality."  But does it perform as well as it looks, or is Shine's beauty only skin-deep?  As with all things so powerfully alluring, the answer is a combination of good and bad.

Honestly, Shine might be the best looking cell phone I've ever seen, and it feels as good to hold as it does to gaze upon.  The all-metal housing is finished in brushed silver with mirror-finish accents and, of course, a mirrored front panel.  You've really got to see the phone's front panel to truly appreciate it - you can literally check your smile, fix your makeup, or just stare at yourself in it until you activate the phone.  The 2.2" TFT LCD display then appears like magic from beneath the mirrored lens.  The effect is super cool.

Measuring 99.8 x 50.6 x 13.8 mm, Shine is neither small nor large as far as current handsets go.  Combined with its 119g of weight and luxurious build, Shine's size gives it the feel of a luxury object.  It's small and thin enough to tuck away neatly inside a pocket or purse, but has the pleasant heft of quality construction.  The sliding mechanism adds to this feel, with a smooth movement and satisfying "click" in both directions.  Oddly, however, I felt a discernible creak when pressing either softkeys with the phone in the "open" position.  The top half of the slider seemed to rock back and forth a bit in its slider track.  Unfortunate to say, but this kind of thing detracts from a handset so clearly focused on look and feel.

A slider phone, Shine shows relatively few buttons when closed.  Beneath the display on the front panel resides a scroll wheel flanked by two cylinder-shaped buttons, and two subtly marked softkeys beyond those.  Sliding the phone open reveals a laser-etched dialing keypad on the bottom portion of the handset: the standard 12 dialing buttons plus an additional row of call, clear, and cancel keys. These buttons actually account for most of Shine's shortcomings. 

The three-way (up/down/select) scrollwheel is particularly difficult to manage, as it tends to be a bit slow to respond at first and then hyper-sensitive when you've finished scrolling and push it to make a selection.  I repeatedly wound up "choosing" the wrong menu item due to the scrollwheel jumping an extra spot up or down as I pushed down on it.  At first I thought maybe I'd gotten a defective handset, but reading other reviews and asking around confirmed that Shine has a wonky wheel, plain and simple. The adjacent buttons are also a bit tricky to deal with, due to their being both small and somewhat crammed in between the scrollwheel and raised metal ridges that seem to have been meant to add to the design aesthetic and/or tactile feedback of the navigation array.  While the phone isn't impossible to work, the controls do detract quite a bit from the overall experience of using it.  Shine is a beautiful device with quite an elegant user interface, but it can be a pain the neck to actually use.

Flipping the handset over, Shine looks more like a high-style digital camera than a phone.  The back panel is finished in sleek brushed metal with the camera sensor, self-portrait mirror, and flash assist light housed in a mirror-finished inset tucked into the upper right corner (when the phone is held the long way).  Subtle logos and rounded corners complete the chic camera effect, and almost the entirety of the rear panel detaches for access to the battery, memory card and SIM card slots. The entire left panel of the handset is blank save for a tether loop slot in the upper corner.  Along the right side we find four buttons - camera, mp3, and volume up/down - in addition to a rubber capped charger/headphone accessory port.  While the decision to mount so many controls on one side of the phone while leaving the other side blank is a bit odd, I didn't find that it made Shine any easier (or harder) to use than handsets that split the buttons between both side panels.
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