The Apple iPhone hype has been so overwhelming that it's easy to forget that there are other damn good phones out there at the moment.

The LG KU990, dubbed Viewty, is a recent favourite of ours. In the same way as the Apple iPhone is instantly appealing, the LG Viewty is beautiful to look at and one of the best-looking phones we've seen. It features an impressive 5-megapixel camera complete with auto-focus and xenon flash.

The real star of the show is the 3-inch LCD touchscreen which lets you type text and email messages, view images, browse the web, shoot video and much more. The touchscreen is amazingly responsive and is also set to vibrate when you enter a command. This gives you a more tactile sense of touching the screen than with standard displays.

The vibrating feature is also useful when typing in a SMS text message or a phone number. The numeric or alphabetic keypad on the touchscreen works in the same way as a standard mobile phone keypad, but without the traditional mechanical buttons.

There's also a handwriting recognition option which you can use for typing emails and text messages. We found this function slow and fiddly though - it was a lot quicker just tapping the touchscreen keypad.

Camera mode

The back of the device looks like any compact digital camera. The main feature, the 5-megapixel lens, sits at one end. We would have preferred if the lens was actually covered when not in use, as it's now unprotected from dust. The xenon flash and auto-focus light is beside the lens.

As for taking pictures, the LG Viewty offers the same camera modes and functionalities as compact digital cameras. You can adjust the size of images, picture quality, ISO and white balance, as well as use the digital stabilisation function to reduce blur.

When you're done shooting you can view your photos in the photo viewer which displays pictures as if you'd laid them out on a table. You can flick through them with your finger - a bit like you use the Cover Flow option in iTunes - or view in the standard mode, all lined up next to each other. You can zoom in on, or open up, a photo by resting your finger on the picture for a couple of seconds.