LG KC910 woes

July 24, 2009 by
Filed under: Communications, Personal, Phone 

As I’ve already said in earlier postings I relatively recently got myself a LG KC910 Renoir phone. The phone has been the cause of a lot of woes and problems so far and I’m afraid I must say I regret not getting a proper Android or iphone from the beginning. As it is, I’m stuck with this phone for another year+ until the subscription runs out – or get some other phone on my own tab.

The one really great part that I love about the KC910 so far is the absolutely wonderful camera, it has a 8MP camera that takes rather splendid snaps for a cellphone camera. Also, the video recording function, and video/music playback is rather nice.

For the really really bad part, well, look at the rest. Three of the main reasons I got this phone was for the ability to get some websurfing done “on the go”, and to get a good calendar that could be synced vs my work and private calendars, and finally I wanted to use the phone straight off for connecting to the internet instead of some dongle. Both these functions are completely botched in the KC910 as the, the webbrowser lacks a lot of functionality practically making most of the internet unusable on the phone, and the browser is also horribly slow, taking tens of seconds to “calculate/draw” complex webpages after its loaded. This problem should be easily solvable by downloading and installing another browser such as Opera you say, sadly, the install process hangs halfway through on the Renoir, and I have so far to find another browser that installs at all, which kind of brings a fourth point up (applications/third party market).

Second problem was the calendar, which is unfortunately totally borked. For basic calendar tasks it works fairly well, but very soon you will realize it doesn’t work very well. It lacks good support for reoccuring activities, the sync applications has a bad habit of screwing up timezones and moving activities/entries around based on timezones and at occasions it deleted entries entirely, and worst of all, LG has chosen to go all the way with their PC Suite set of applications, which essentially bars you from using anything but officially supported Microsoft Windows XP/Vista and Outlook. This goes for pretty much all functionality in the phone. Getting it to work with thunderbird, well, good luck. This is one of the reasons I had to work very hard getting Funambol setup at home to sync the phone and thunderbird with (I can not use a third party server as some calendar entries may in worst case contain sensitive data). The functionality of this setup worked out to be “semi-decent” to crap at best, and in the end I winded up reverting to just using my computer calendars.

My third problem has been internet connections. The only supported way of connecting to the internet is (again) via their PC Suite crapware. All other phone manufacturers support Bluetooth DUN or serial port connections without a problem, but not LG. It halfway supports DUN connections, I get a connection the first time that doesnt work, then get disconnected, and after that it takes 2+ days until I can connect again, and get disconnected again, exactly the same thing happened in Linux, Vista, XP, with/without PC Suite, over USB/Bluetooth, in accordance with 3’s and LG’s support etc. In the end, after 3-4 weeks of messing with this, I winded up getting a Huawei E180 HSPA USB stick, 30 seconds to unpack, plug in and click two buttons in Ubuntu and I was connected to the Internet.

My final annoyance is the lack of a third party aftermarket of some kind, I’m talking anything like the Iphone/Android app-store. A smart phone without a serious aftermarket support is pretty much as dumb as any old “dumb phone” ever was. LG has some eclipse based SDK’s available for download, but they only work for Windows, which has stopped me from trying them out at all so far, as I quit using windows completely half a year back. Anyways, the big problem is that there is no coordinated effort to make a decent app-store or app-store-a-like place to go for your applications for this phone. As always, the phone producers completely fails at understanding this part, in this day and age, you need to create officially endorsed systems of managing, getting and paying for applications. Whom the problem should fall upon is a hard question, but just dumping the problem on someone elses porch is not sufficient in this day and age, especially if you want to make phones that tries to emulate the success of “the big one”, you need to at least try and understand what made it big. It wasn’t a good camera or a nice looking (but slow) gui. It’s the ability to be adapted to my requirements, and to perform my required tasks. You can not predict it all (my needs are not your needs), hence adapt to standards (make shit plug and play with others), and make every effort you can to create a third party aftermarket that works (signed downloads, payments, etc etc).

As a verdict, if you’re looking for a smartphone/iphone/android, dont get an LG.

Comments

3 Comments on LG KC910 woes

  1. Igogi on Wed, 2nd Dec 2009 12:44
  2. Totally agree with you. I started to search for a deecent google calendar sync to the KC910 and stopped at the point where I discovered, that none of the other OS (like Android / Windows) can be instaloled on this phone. This phone has totaly changed my future shoping preferences…

  3. Crispy on Tue, 22nd Dec 2009 06:12
  4. I’ve got a KC910, installed mini opera. Installed fine, works great. I agree, the standard browser is terrible, but mini opera goes great. make sure you have latest firmware and try again. Also, if anyone has found a way to sync wit google calendar(s), would be great to know.

  5. John Baratta on Tue, 2nd Feb 2010 06:45
  6. I also have a KC910 and agree with the comments above. I also discovered that recurring appointments are totally screwed up on the phone making the whole exercise of syncing totally pointless. Today I thought I’d give LG tech support a call to see if there was a solution. Don’t bother! They denied there was any problem with the phone and there software and basically implied that any problems were my fault.
    I will never buy an LG phone again!

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