A new gadget - The LG KP199

Calling it a gadget would be a misnomer. It’s just a simple mobile phone that I procured last week. The LG KP199. This time the decision process was albeit easy. Needed a phone with good battery backup, FM Radio, MP3 player, Bluetooth and support for external memory card. This one supports all of these plus the battery backup is amazing. And it came at a lovely price – 4300 INR. Aha that’s value for money. Threw in a 2GB card for an extra 600 INR.

The features & specifications aside, some of the positives and negatives that I can say about this model are

Plus Points

• Damn good battery life. (Easily ignore charging for a week).
• Speedy Bluetooth (File transfers are really fast).
• Charges through USB (Just connect to your PC/laptop for charging).
• Decent looks, Lightweight, Sleek design and form size.
• Call Recording.
• Scheduled/Manual FM recording (though I may hardly use this feature).
• Scheduled Switch On/Switch Off settings.

Minus Points

• Average screen (atleast they should have reduced the text fontsize a bit)
• VGA camera (okay it’s decent and comes with video recording too but doesn’t satisfy the snapper in me).
• Bluetooth keeps asking for permission for all transfers (even after pairing).
• Can't set an external ringtone for messages.
• Java system if okay but not great
• The MP3 player doesn’t recurse through subdirectories. So your huge collection of MP3’s need to be copied flat into the “My Music” folder.
• The PC Suite supplied with it is pathetic. It provides nothing but a rudimentary phonebook editor. LG needs to improve the software.

I was wondering how LG managed to pack such an offering in the specified price bracket and then I had the answer. This one seemingly uses the MTK6226 for its CPU. MTK6226 is the chip from Mediatek that provides for onboard audio, video & gprs support with good power optimization. In fact this is what majority of the better-known Chinese phones in the market use as their core baseband engine. Even the source code for Chinese phones using the MTK6226 is available online (if you know where and how to search).

Well for now I feel it will be interesting to attempt writing a better phone suite for the LG KP199. Shouldn’t be a tough proposition. A decent USB sniffing tool and a better understanding of libusb should definitely assist here. Marking it as a project for later.

Anyway, with this acquisition I let go of my old trusty Motorola E398, the sturdy piece with a very active modding community. Hope the KP199 leaves up to its predecessor (atleast in terms of the shocks and jolts suffered ;-).