LG KP130

Available now
6th July 2008
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A step or two up from the LG KP100 and the straight replacement for the KG130, the LG KP130 is a very low cost handset with a VGA resolution digital camera.

With a recommended retail price of €79 and a street price of just €52 or so, the KP130 is certainly quite inexpensive. It looks a lot better than the hideous KG130 too.

But in many ways, the KP130 demonstrates a problem that mobile phone designers have when it comes to entry-level handsets. Whereas the very bottom end of the market can concentrate on delivering either the cheapest phones around or are squeezing in as many features as they can into the sub-€40 price bracket, manufacturers can often struggle to come up with something just a little bit higher in the product range.

What you get for your money here is a GPRS capable phone with a 1.5" 128 x 128 pixel CSTN display, MIDI polyphonic ringtones and a VGA resolution camera. The KP130's GPRS goes hand-in-hand with a web browser, although the small screen will prove to be somewhat limiting, but still of some use.

The other feature over the cheaper KP100 is the VGA resolution camera. But exactly how useful is this going to be? These old 0.3 megapixel cameras were pretty useless in their heyday, and because the KP130 lacks removable memory or a USB port then it is hard to see how the pictures could be transferred off. The KP130's screen is too small to fiddle around with images, and even though the handset supports MMS, the picture quality tends to be poor. And who actually uses MMS messaging anyway?

There were phones like the KP130 around five years ago - and if you can remember what phones were like back in 2003 then you will probably remember that they were pretty awful to use. Of course, the KP130 is much cheaper than a similar phone was 5 years ago, but if you're on a budget then perhaps the cheaper KP100 is of more use.

The KP130 should be available in the next few days on a variety of networks across Europe, Vodafone and Debitel in Germany are already confirmed.