LG’s Viewty could best be described as a poor man’s iPhone, with its huge touch screen display and slick interface, but in fact the camera part of the device, which sports a 5MP sensor, trounces the woefully poor 2MP camera on the Apple product – on paper, at least.

LG has also made the Viewty look more like a compact camera than a phone.

The camera is activated by pressing the shutter button. All the controls are accessed via the touch screen and there’s a fair list of options: six scene modes plus auto, four white balance presets plus auto, ISO up to 800, manual focusing and macro modes, plus the usual image size options.

Painfully sluggish focusing is followed by a delay of around a second between pressing the shutter and the exposure being made, though this is also the case with every camera phone we’ve tried.

Picture quality is not actually that bad, certainly for screen use or enprints. Even prints up to A4 are not out of the question in favourable shooting conditions, though it degrades significantly as you go up the ISO scale.

Verdict: