LG's latest clamshell is a godsend for users frustrated by tiny controls. Boasting perhaps the largest keypad we've ever seen, in addition to extra-large font options, the KF300 has clearly been designed with convenience and usability in mind.
The KF300 retains the familiar LG look and feel. The front is a mix of gloss and bling, with a deep blue finish taking up most of the real estate and a chrome panel surrounding the built-in camera. Chrome edges and a bezel surrounding the internal display are also nice touches. The handset feels reasonably well built, although the phone is difficult to flip open with one hand.
The KF300's keypad is massive. The keys are by far the biggest we've ever seen. They are flat, but despite this tactile feedback is excellent and typing is comfortable. The rest of the controls are also abnormally large: a five-way navigational pad supports dual selection buttons, camera and clear keys and answer/end call buttons. If you're constantly frustrated by phones with tiny buttons and keypads, then the KF300 is definitely the phone for you.
LG has conveniently added a single row of four shortcut keys: alarms, calendar, new message and the wine menu. The last of these is a small application about wines, consisting of a wine search, wine dictionary and wine map. It's quite a strange feature to be included on a mobile phone, but if you consider yourself a budding wine connoisseur then you should appreciate it.
LG has gone all the way with the large theme by offering a range of extra-large font sizes for all menus. Accessible in the display settings menu, you can choose from normal, medium, large, very large and super font sizes, and both submenus and SMS messages are affected. Strangely, changes don't affect the main menu, which remains at the standard size.
Unfortunately, the KF300 isn't 3G-capable: you'll need to look elsewhere if you're after a handset capable of accessing mobile Internet at speeds faster than a snail. Voice quality is excellent, in particular incoming audio. It's among the clearest and loudest handsets we've reviewed. Ring tones and general audio sounds are also excessively loud, so you should never miss a call or message.
The rest of the features are fairly standard for a handset in this price range. It has a 2-megapixel camera that doubles as a video recorder, a built-in FM radio and Bluetooth with A2DP support; there is also a voice recorder and an MP3 player that supports multiple file formats. Unfortunately, the multimedia features are let down by the proprietary headphone/charging jack. A microSD card slot allows extra memory, though no card is included in the sales package and the slot is annoyingly located beneath the battery.
Virgin Mobile offers the KF300 for $149 on a prepaid plan or for $0 upfront on a Free to V 20 post-paid cap.
