LG Shine

Like the Chocolate, the LG Shine is a slide-design phone, and is very much intended as a fashion statement. Whereas the Chocolate was dark and mysterious, with its hidden touch sensitive keypad, the Shine positively sparkles with light and has a more conventional keypad.

The reason for the name "Shine", is that the phone is highly reflective, having a shiny stainless steel body and a large LCD display that turns into a mirror when not in use. It's definitely a cool-looking phone and one that will attract attention.
The device itself feels sufficiently weighty for such a small phone - with its brushed stainless steel covering, it's little wonder. This helps to make it feel suitably expensive, but considering the small size and minimal thickness it's still a lightweight.The steel covering means it's strong, too - no chance of breaking this phone in two. The construction is perfect and the slide action is well weighted, revealing a gorgeous laser-etched keypad that lights up in blue.

The front mirrored fascia is finished in tough plastic rather than metal (transparent metal is difficult to come by), and despite the delicate appearance of the front screen it's proven rather scratch resistant.The good looks of the handset don't stop at the exterior - the interface is particularly easy to use as well. Navigation is via the nifty scroll bar on the front of the phone, making navigation of the menus relatively easy. It can be a little imprecise at times - sometimes pressing down on the scroll bar to select something can result in moving the cursor to something else - but apart from this it's intuitive and nice to use.

LG has also added a good scroll wheel to the device on the main body, just under the screen. This becomes your main navigational tool, and is an excellent way of finding what you want on the device. It makes a big difference to have this when, say, searching through your contact list.
Other buttons lie along the right-hand side of the phone, where there is a noticeable lack of a ‘cancel-and-exit’ button which came in handy with the LG Chocolate. Now they’ve decided to hide it away on a slide-down keypad, which can be a little fustrating. Nevertheless, the camera and MP3 player now have their separate buttons on the side, which makes it much easier to quickly take a snap.

The LG Shine is equipped with a 2 megapixel camera with autofocus and picture quality generally is decent. There is a lot of graining as expected but at 1600×1200 it will suffice for taking recognisable pictures. The light for the LG Shine it seems has to be activated manually via the menu causing it to stay on constantly and there is no option to have it flash when taking a picture.

In all the LG Shine does many things superbly and gives off the right impression. With a few operating system tweaks, some better themes and better software it could be a serious killer mobile. Instead it ranks highly and would be a mobile to look out for if you are in the market for a simple and elegant mobile.