LG Shine review

You can hold the phone sideways as you would a digital camera, and take pictures using the dedicated button on the right side. The camera features a Schneider Kreuznach lens, autofocus and an LED photo light. There's also a very small portrait mirror so you can take photos of yourself.

Some of the camera's more advanced settings include the ability to adjust the focus mode, set a timer, add a colour effect, adjust the white balance and even take multiple pictures in quick succession. You can also use the camera to shoot videos, although weirdly you can only use the digital zoom in the video mode, not in the camera mode.

The MP3 player is fairly simple and lets you change the equaliser levels, play mode, set it to shuffle and display a real spectrum of the track that's playing. It supports MP3, WAV, AAC, AAC+ and AAC++ files.

The Shine comes with an in-line MP3 player remote that lets you attach a pair of normal 3.5mm headphones. It also lets you make hands-free calls and navigate through your contacts.

You get 50MB of built-in memory, which isn't a lot of space, but fortunately there's an expandable microSD slot for up to 2GB of tunes, pictures or videos. We like the fact that you can drag and drop tracks straight on to the phone -- many manufacturers force you to use their own poorly written PC software to transfer songs.

You can also use the Shine as a USB mass-storage drive and, combined with the built-in document reader -- which can view text files and PDFs, as well as PowerPoint, Word and Excel documents -- this is a very useful feature. Other features include a WAP browser, MMS and SMS messaging, a video player, speakerphone mode, Bluetooth 1.2, email client, a voice recorder, a calendar, memo, a calculator, a stop watch and Java games.

A noteworthy but slightly gimmicky feature is the world clock, which displays a globe of the world and lets you zoom in to different continents and countries in a similar style to Google Earth.

Finding contacts and sending text messages is more complicated than it should be, requiring more button-pushes than is strictly necessary, but it's not a deal-breaker.

Performance
Audio quality during calls was clear and there were no noticeable distortions or feedback. The speakerphone, however, is difficult to hear unless you're in a quiet room. Audio quality on the MP3 player was loud and clear and was made better by the fact that you can use your own headphones via the in-line adaptor.

The 2-megapixel camera takes relatively sharp photos in good light and we found that the autofocus works well. It does, however, seem a little outdated next to phones with 3.2-megapixel sensors, like the Nokia N73. The LED photo light isn't particularly powerful and will only work properly at close range, unlike the xenon flash on Sony Ericsson's K800i.

The battery lasted for about two days before we had to recharge it.

Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Kate Macefield