The LG Shine or LG KE970

The LG Shine or LG KE970 slide phone with 50MB memory and 2.0 mega pixel digital camera.

The Shine's features are decent, but its brains don't really match its beauty. We'll start with the basics first. The phone book holds a healthy, 1,000 contacts with room in each entry for four phone numbers, an e-mail address, and notes (the SIM card holds an additional 250 names). You can save contacts to groups, assign them a photo for caller ID, and pair them with any of 20, 40-chord polyphonic ringtones.

Other essentials include a vibrate mode, text and multimedia messaging, an alarm clock, a calculator, a memo pad, a stop watch, a unit converter, and a world clock. On the higher end, you get a voice recorder, e-mail support, Bluetooth, and a speakerphone. You can use the KE970 as a USB mass-storage drive and the document reader allows you to view text files and PDFs, as well as PowerPoint, Word, and Excel documents. The internal memory is impressive at 50MB of shared space, and you can use a microSD card for more room.

The 2.0 megapixel camera outshines (no pun intended) the Chocolate's shooter in many ways. You can take photos in a selection of resolutions, from full two megapixels (1,600x1,200 pixels) down to VGA and below (320x240 pixels). Other camera features include a self-timer, three quality modes, four color effects, an adjustable white-balance setting, a choice of shutter sounds, and a multi-shot mode (available only at the lowest resolutions). The Shine's camera also comes fully equipped with a self-portrait mirror and a flash.

The camcorder shoots videos with sound in two resolutions (128x96 or 176x144). It also includes a set of editing options similar to the still camera, and you can use the zoom. Clips meant for multimedia messages are capped at eight seconds; otherwise you can shoot for as long as the available memory permits.

The bottom line, the LG Shine KE970 is a pretty phone with decent performance.