We got our hands on the latest LG mobile last week, the LG Secret. It’s the latest addition to the Black Label (not the popular lager) range and is the follow-up to the LG Shine: first impressions are it’s a worthy successor.

It’s tough
LG have taken notice of how the current mobile contracts last 18 to 24 months and have made the Secret a tough, long lasting phone. It has a carbonfibre back and tempered glass touch screen front (as found on Rolex watches), thus ensuring you can smack the screen with a set of keys without breakage (a cool trick for down the pub).

Interface
Input to the Secret is via the slide out numeric keyboard, neon touch navigation panel and the main display is also a touch sensitive. The keyboard is fairly flat but responsive and when the phone is locked can be used like a musical keyboard which is a nice touch. The flat navigation panel serves as general left/right/up/down navigation and, like the LG Viewty , it gives you vibrating feedback when pressed. The 2.4” TFT LCD touch screen runs at QVGA resolution (240×320 pixels) and has built in auto-luminance control so the brightness automatically adjusts to make the display clear to read in both bright and dark conditions. Unfortunately only a few of the included applications used the top touch screen and I found I was often touching icons to no effect, but as this is a pre-release model hopefully more applications will be included when it is publicly released.

Motion Sensor
New to the Black Label range, the Secret incorporates a motion sensor so can auto-rotate the screen when viewing photos and documents and has some simple but innovative Wii style games, like rolling a ball around a maze by tilting the phone or playing darts by ‘throwing’ the phone forward with a flick of the wrist (just don’t leave go … um, perhaps this could be another reason for the Secret’s toughness). You can also set the motion dependant m-Toy games as your phone’s background which is another nice touch.

Camera
At the time of writing, the Secret is the slimmest 5 mega pixel camera phone, measuring 11.8mm thick. Image quality is as good as you’d expect on a phone, you still get the customary lag when taking snaps. When recording video it has a 30 fps VGA mode or if you need speed over quality you can record at 120 fps in QVGA mode which puts many conventional camcorders to shame. The included software supports basic photo and video editing.

Conclusion
Overall the LG Secret is a pretty cool phone, it has a few quirks in the software (locking every few seconds when the keyboard isn’t slid out is particularly annoying and the top touch screen being heavily underused). Other than that it’s a good phone and the motion sensor is a great addition for the gamer. It might not look as sexy as the iPhone but it is hard.

The LG Secret should be available May/June 2008. Further info available on the LG Blog and Secret Mini Site.

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