Uncategorized

We review the LG GW520, LG’s QWERTY messaging phone which could well be described as a Cookie with a keyboard

The LG GW520 appears to be a smartphone, but it actually brings together elements of two previous LG midrange handsets, the KP500 Cookie and the KS360. It resembles the Cookie, with its large touchscreen above three buttons – call start and stop/power, plus a shortcuts/task manager. But it also has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard à la KS360.

The LG GW520 comes with a 2.8 inch screen that displays 262,000 colours with a 240×400 pixel resolution so it’s sharp and clear, and just about big enough for viewing videos longer than a pop promo. Around the sides are the volume buttons, screen lock key, shutter key and microSD memory card slot with a microUSB power/headphone slot on top.

But the star of the show is the slide-out QWERTY keyboard, which LG has done a fairly good job of disguising. Most QWERTY handsets are heavy, rotund affairs, but at 107x53x16mm and 125g, the GW520 is more pocket-friendly than most. It slides out to the left to reveal four lines of keys (40 in all) that are well spaced out and clearly demarcated in slightly bulbous tactile plastic. The numeric section is marked by a different coloured background as are the arrow keys and all in all it’s a joy to use.

It’s a shame that the same couldn’t be said about the screen though. All touchscreens should be sensitive enough to react to your presses yet be robust enough to distinguish between a tap and a brush. The LG GW520′s resistive screen we found to be pretty inconsistent, especially when using the browser, and we often had to make repeated jabs at the screen for our instructions to take effect.

The LG GW520 reprises the widget-based interface we’ve seen on other LG touchscreen phones, with a tray at the bottom of the screen from which you can drag and drop widgets for a variety of functions onto your home screen and arrange them how you like.

The line-up is good, as far as it goes, with analogue and digital world clocks, messages, web search, music player, FM radio, notes, image slideshow, calendar, weather, push e-mail and Facebook. But you can’t add to the widgets from the menu, so there’s no widget for your internet home page or movie player, which seems a shame.

Brush the homescreen to the side and LG has a surprise for you. Livesquare is an animated home screen featuring a park, field or zoo populated by avatars of your contacts. You can choose animal or human avatars and each displays their current status, including how many messages they’ve sent you or if they’ve called.

If you haven’t assigned an avatar to a caller, they appear with a question mark for a head. It’s a nice, if non-essential option, though it would have been better with a greater number of avatars to choose from, though this may follow as a software update.

Email is easy to set up, and you’ll only need your address and password in most cases. A useful option is push email, which you’ll need to set up separately and keep running in the background if you want to benefit from up-to-the-minute mail gathering. There’s also a Facebook app which allows you to keep tabs on your profile but unfortunately it won’t push your updates to you, push email style – you’ll need to check it manually to see what’s going on.

The 3 megapixel camera is a basic affair with no flash and no autofocus. It starts up reasonably quickly however at a shade under four seconds and takes pictures with barely a one second delay, so it’s not bad for quick snaps. It can take pics at up to 2048×1536 pixels and the slim parade of extras includes burst mode (three, six or nine pics), night mode and a timer (three, five or ten seconds). There’s an editing suite that allows you to add text, drawings or icons as well as effects such as oil painting and pixilation.

Picture quality isn’t bad if you’re careful with your light, producing fairly sharp edges with minimal fringing. Video drops the quality by recording in QVGA resolution at just 12fps, but you can augment your vids with audio or text overdubs and merge videos together with a variety of fade options.

Videos look good on the screen incidentally, though we could only get it to play MPEG4 format. Music offered a greater variety of codecs, including MP3, AAC and WMA, but it’s a pity there’s no 3.5mm headphone jack to upgrade the tinny supplied headphones. The FM radio with 50 presets worked fine though.

The browser is a bit of a shambles – slow and awkward in a way no modern browser should be. It’s not helped by the lack of Wi-Fi, which denies you access to broadband, though it does have the next best thing, HSDPA 3G with up to 7.2Mbps download speeds, if your network supports it. Zooming proved to be awkward since pressing a point on the screen produced intermittent results, and the outsize menu bars are very intrusive.

Memory-wise there’s a pathetic 40MB on board though you can bump this up to 16GB via microSD card, though there’s none supplied. The battery holds up pretty well though, delivering on LG’s promise of 4.5 hours of talk time and 500 hours of standby with a good two days and more of moderate use before needing a recharge.

The LG GW520 is a decent looking phone and that well executed QWERTY keyboard makes messaging a breeze. But it’s let down by that unresponsive touchscreen and shoddy browser, and we’d have really liked to have had Wi-Fi.