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LG’s budget touchscreen handset the Cookie, like Samsung’s Corby range, has enjoyed quite a bit of fame in its time and spawned a few variants of its own. Although LG hasn’t officially dubbed these officially as Cookies, the design, features and price range they’re available at make it a bit obvious. The GT505 is one of these variants on the higher end strobe and here’s how it fared. Form Factor Maintaining the cool, slim, lightweight look and feel of the original KP500 Cookie, the GT505 is slightly more sophisticated in features though. The 3-inch touchscreen is quite responsive and although you won’t really require the stylus, it does come in handy from time to time. On one side is a microSD card slot and on the other is a proprietary all-in-one port for the charger, USB and handsfree. The lack of a separate handsfree port is never a good idea. On the same side are the volume/zoom keys, a screen lock and the shutter release for the 5MP camera with LED flash. Features and Performance Interface Bearing the same UI as the Cookie, but a lot less sluggish, the GT505 is very finger friendly. Icons and menus are large and very manageable without the stylus. The stylus can be used for the handwriting feature for typing messages and although it’s just a wee bit slow, it’s very intuitive. Like the KP500, the menus have been neatly categorized into four groups – Communication, Entertainment, Utilities and Settings which only makes things really easy for navigation. The onscreen QWERTY keyboard looks really small for stubby fingers but is remarkably acute after you’ve calibrated the screen. The only issue with the entire UI is the browser. It’s simple and well designed but it can be a bit tricky without the stylus’ accuracy to select links. The Gallery section is not well laid out. It merely showcases all movies and images into one collection without allowing you to select just images, or just videos. You’ll have to sort it according to type and then search via thumbnail. Image or video names will only show up after you’ve opened the file and switched to portrait mode. This is the same in the S-Class UI and it’s a ‘bug’ that MUST be fixed. Media The music player is great. Audio is loud and the quality is very clear. The EQ presets also make quite a bit of difference to the overall experience. The handset’s Stereo FM radio also proved quite effective and was able to pick up stations even in areas that I normally get only static. The video player reads MPEG4 and 3GP files well enough, too bad there aren’t any more codecs. The only problem is that the video player doesn’t have a stretch to fit option. So if your files are in a 4:3 format you’ll have to watch them with black bands on the sides. The GT505 also has a Muvee Studio application which is actually no more than a customizable slide show creator for your images. You can’t actually edit or even use videos for that matter. The Image editor is quite useful and allows for a wide variety of settings to make post processing a lot of fun. The level of alterations it allows for is quite high. |
Tags: Touchscreen , 5 Megapixel , Wi-Fi , LG
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