LG Renoir review

With the recent release of Samsung’s Pixon and LG’s Renoir the battle of the 8 megapixel touch-screen camera phones is well and truly underway.

Both devices boast openly of their photographic prowess and multimedia capabilities, so we were understandably intrigued when we managed to get our grubby mitts on one of these high-profile competitors: LG’s Renoir.

While the concept of naming a phone after a famous artist might seem unusual, it makes a little more sense when you start to play around with the Renoir’s Schneider Kreuznach-certified 8 megapixel camera…

Sporting excellent photo quality and a raft of neat features such as face detection (also seen on the Pixon) and smile recognition (which ensures you only take a shot when your subject is displaying a beaming grin), this is a phone that might just convince you to leave your traditional digital camera at home.

With 100 megabytes of internal memory and a bundled 8GB microSD card (at least that is the case with the model we played around with), there’s also plenty of room to store your photographic exploits (as well as numerous other media items, obviously).

The Renoir’s multimedia aspirations are well-founded, too – not only does it support DivX movie playback but it also has Dolby Mobile, which ensures the aural experience is just as impressive. We were sad to see the absence of a 3.5mm headphone jack, but LG certainly isn’t the only firm to be guilty of omitting such a feature.

Elsewhere the feature list continues to impress – Wi-Fi is included for high-speed data transfer and this makes surfing the web a breeze, and the built-in accelerometer is used to sense how you’re holding the phone (portrait or landscape) and for gaming. There’s also GPS which allows you to geo-tag your photos and check the distance you’ve jogging using the pre-installed fitness program.

If we were going to find fault with the phone then we’d have to point the finger (no pun intended) at the touch-screen interface. It uses ‘resistive’ technology which is pressure sensitive (rather than ‘capacitive’ screens, like the one seen on Apple’s iPhone, which are more responsive).

Sometimes it takes a good prod with your digit to register a touch and while the included stylus alleviates this issue, it bizarrely has nowhere to dock on the phone itself; you have to instead use the provided holder, which is fitted to the Renoir via a lanyard – hardly the most elegant solution.

We were also a little disappointed with the speed of the operating system. Skipping between screens often takes longer than it reasonably should and it’s not uncommon to find that the Renoir struggles to keep up with the speed of your fingers.

Still, if you can look past these issues then it’s relatively easy to fall in love with this phone. The Renoir is well equipped, packed with features and is sure to turn heads whenever you take it out of your pocket.

We wouldn’t go as far as to label it an iPhone killer, but if you’re serious about taking photos with your phone then this is a solid choice.

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