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Media playback is far more impressive. For starters, there's a dedicated Music player application, which will happily embrace any AAC, MP3, WAV or WMA tracks you can throw at it. Again, it's a bare bones app, but you can construct playlists, filter by genre, artist or album, and define favourites that will appear on the Multimedia home screen.
TUNES: The Music player application is rudimentary but it can play back AAC, MP3, WAV or WMA files
Hook up the LG Viewty Smart via USB or Bluetooth and you can copy music files over manually. Or there's a Music Sync option, which lets you drag-and-drop tracks from inside Windows Media Player. To be honest, keeping things simple and treating the phone like an external drive is easier.
RADIO: The built-in FM radio is easy to use and, if you stand still and don't walk about too much, maintains good reception.
Thanks to Dolby Mobile technology, the audio has a real kick to it, easily eclipsing the iPhone in terms of sound quality. Pressing the power button gives you instant access to the Music player to skip tracks or stop playback. The music will also automatically pause when a call comes in; starting up again when you hang up.
Dig further into the menus and you'll also find that LG has squeezed in an FM radio. This will give you around six years of local radio listening if the government follows up the Digital Britain report and ditches FM transmissions by 2015.
CODECS: Not only can the LG Viewty Smart play back its own 3GPP files, but it'll happily accept DivX and XviD without complaint.
PLAYBACK: We tested the DivX playback with Ashes to Ashes. It wasn't specifically encoded for the Viewty but played perfectly.
The LG Viewty Smart is also a capable video player. Beyond its ability to play back its own 3GPP video clips, it features built-in DivX support. LG supplies DivX Converter software on the CD that ships with the phone, so you can spend hours converting your favourite TV shows to watch on the move.
We dragged-and-dropped a 683MB episode of Ashes to Ashes across and, when we could eventually find the file, the LG Viewty Smart coped admirably with playback (in both portrait and landscape modes). The only niggle? It doesn't remember how far you've watched if you close down the player and restart it.
