mobil phone: LG GW300 impressions

LG has kept our thumbs busy in recent days with his GW300 - a FeaturePhone 2G portrait QWERTY keyboard, a first for LG, which joins the likes of Samsung and Freeform CorbyTXT NQI's Chat with 3G. O2 UK offers this phone with just a standalone price of 78.29 pounds ($ 129) with a minimum of £ 10 ($ 16.50) top the original, but little is known about the availability of the United States at this time. Anyway, there's no harm to point your eyes to our consideration sexy just case something happens tomorrow. Go ahead - you know where to click.

Hardware


One of the first things we noticed - or not notice - was the weight GW300 LG. Just for comparison, the BlackBerry Bold 9700 weighs 4.3 ounces, while the GW300 is a mere 3.53 ounces. Despite the levity, you will find many physical characteristics everywhere: a circular D-pad sandwiched by two concave buttons, a decent 2.4-inch 320 x 240 LCD, a QWERTY keyboard (of course, although our test unit was accompanied by a German version QWERTZ), an FM radio (headset required), a handsfree jack standard 3.5 mm (awesome) and a micro-USB port. There is also a hot-swappable slot for a microSD card, supporting up to 16GB. Back on the lie of a 900mAh removable battery and two megapixels with no flash. For color options you have silver and black (like our review unit), silver and red and silver and aqua.



Obviously our main interest lies in the performance of the keyboard. In general, we found the keys to be stiffer and denser than is preferred - we put the BlackBerry Curve series to be our benchmark for rigidity and keyboard key spacing. The combination of these two factors makes it difficult for us to say if we press the right buttons, and we talk with our Asian Small hands here too. Indeed, there was a typo about 10% of the time which is probably tolerable, although not inch tires quickly transition from keyboard to touch-boxing very heavy on the GW300. Another key problem is that the shift key is placed below the "Y" no better reason other than to annoy his dear customers. Not cool. Keys are going well with the backspace and enter shifted down by a row because they are still accessible, but the shift key is just way too low for anyone here takes seriously the capitalization SMS (read: the average teenage texter may not care). On a more positive note, we dig the pads under the concave screen, which will host the two keys, a menu button and a cancel / key lock - all easily accessible and comfortable to use.

To test the voice quality of GW300, we discussed a trip to Birmingham International station, and boy, it was well deserved - a simple phone call to our office in North London gave us a crystal clear on both ends, even when we were right by a train running on diesel. We then tested the two-megapixel camera and given the mixed performance of the video samples - the pictures are of acceptable quality in well lit conditions (and there is no flash to help either), while the highly compressed 3GP videos have been over one eye burner that materials YouTube.

You can expect to get all bog standard features of the GW300: calendar, alarm clock, calculator, notes, media players, java games, email, etc. We had no qualms with most of these tools - the only bit ridiculous was the lack of customizable options for the alarm time events calendar. Simple it may be, but the music player can deal with a handful of common formats, including MP3, WMA, AAC and MP4 - all can be set as your ringtone or sound system in the drive. Even a full 320kbps worked fine and the line-out audio sounded just as good as a regular PMP (no sound handsfree provided asset - our review unit did not come with one). We just wish LG could twist the drive so that the key lock does not stop the music before locking the screen. Yeah, really. As for the video player that we had to stick to the MP4 format and no larger than the screen resolution - the iPod video settings worked like a charm (we had 30fps and 900kbps encoded Xvid).

A notable feature is the option LiveSquare screen that can also be found on many other LG phones. It displays your contacts in the familiar form of avatars animated humanoid in a field (our favorite is the bread that flashes and jumps), giving you a quick summary of their text messages, phone calls and emails.

We finally got the Java application Facebook hidden in the Applications folder - apparently right click on the D-pad does it, but we have not had any luck with that. With the lack of 3G and WiFi connections as well as the slowness of this application, patience is your only friend until the app is done with the initial load. You get all the basic functions such as display updates, update your status, writing on walls, and watch the pictures. Unfortunately, no pictures or a video download tool here - but this software should be enough to keep Facebook addicts happy for short trips. Non-Facebook users may of course have fun with the browser, but note that it does not handle large sites well - we got error messages about insufficient memory, so you should stick to sites mobile.



There is much potential in the LG GW300, particularly for sub-$ 130 price - it covers all your basic needs with the addition of Facebook on the go, and do not require you to helmet ownership and ports power. We would say it's perfect for sending SMS addicts, with a modest budget that does not bother too much about connection speeds and quality Web camera - the main audience is probably young teenagers here. All we ask is now a softer, more spacious keyboard and a camera better, so we got a deal. Oh, and a Twitter app would be nice, too.