LG KU380 — 3G for the masses
December 30, 2008
Six months ago, C.U.R.E. held a party at the Rockwell Tent and gave away some 750 cell phones in a “raffle”. Since there were about that many guests, the raffle was really for who would get the phones first. They were the LG KU380, billed as “3G for Everyone” because of the relatively low price (about PhP7,500, maybe less nowadays). Oddly enough, although it was a C.U.R.E. event, the handsets weren’t locked to C.U.R.E., which at that time went with the umobile brand. I used a Globe SIM until C.U.R.E. arranged for the delivery of a umobile SIM a few weeks later. I managed to run a few bandwidth tests with the SIM, and I’ll write about those in another post so I can focus on the KU380.
(An aside: “umobile” is spelled with the dots over the ‘u’, i.e., the umlaut.)
The KU380 is a slider phone with 3G, BlueTooth, a 1.3 megapixel camera, T9, Java, and the usual gaggle of software accessories such as an organizer and a multimedia player capable of playing MP3 and 3GP files. Speaking of which, you can set your ringtone to an MP3. The specs aren’t spectacular but the phone gives me what I need, and most of what I want.
Given Nokia’s worldwide market share, a comparison is inevitable. The only Nokia I have is a 6108 which is a hand-me-up from my niece in Australia. It’s an old GPRS model, maybe three years old, but the comparison isn’t as one-sided as you might think.
