LG GD510
It shows how far the mobile world has come when even the most budget-friendly phones can pack some touchscreen action. We’ve seen a few devices try and go down the smartphone route on the cheap (the HTC Tattoo) and some offering bog-standard touch at rock-bottom prices (Orange Vegas we are looking at you), but LG’s latest money friendly endeavour, the LG Pop, tries to bridge the gap between price and functionality.
Popping on to the scene for a snip under £100, the LG GD510 Pop has a surprising amount of decent features on offer. On-board there’s a 3.2-megapixel camera, a 3-inch WQVGA screen, wireless FM radio and expandable MicroSD memory.
But it’s also surprising the lack of features it houses, some that you’ve come to expect on even the most standard of devices –3G and to a lesser extent Wi-Fi are both missing in action. Size-wise the phone is the Kylie of the mobile world: small but perfectly formed.
Size matters
While it measures a mere 97.8 x 49.5 x 11.2mm, it does boast the biggest touchscreen on a phone this size, something that will come as relief to those with fumble fingers. In an attempt to make things as simple as possible, real buttons are scarce. What you get is three in all: one on the Pop’s front which acts as a home screen button; one on the side of the handset which, when pressed, transports you to your favourite apps and also moonlights as the shutter button for the phone’s camera; and finally there’s one on top which powers the GD510 down.
The main interface of the Pop is an interesting one. You can cram it as much as you want with widgets available on the phone. If the UI looks to be getting a bit cluttered, then shake you’re the Pop to align them. It’s a great little feature which gives the phone a bit of character.
Those who have played with the LG Cookie will be right at home with the Pop. Like the Cookie, default widgets on the homepage include a clock, calendar and access to this internet – although all of these can be toggled to your specs. Flick the screen to the left and you will notice that there are two more ‘home’ screens to add things to. One of these is for your contacts, while the other can be an extension of your original homepage. This is where the Pop shows off its true colours. With access here to avatars for your contacts and even a virtual farmyard, LG is definitely pitching the phone at younger social-networkers.
Being a budget-friendly device means that the phone’s touchscreen is a bit of a ’mare to use. The resistive touch is sluggish and accessing widgets took longer than expected to open. Sometimes it did take two to three attempts to perform a task which was a tad annoying.
Handy features do keep popping up to make you think the device is offering more than its budget price suggests. Things like the Status Summary page, which points out how much battery memory you have left is great, and from here you can also toggle Bluetooth on and off.
Pop tart or pop star?
Drill into the phone a bit more and it does become apparent that what you are using is a low-end device. Opening up and playing songs and movies is far too sluggish for our liking and while it’s great there’s an on-board camera and camcorder the footage you get from both doesn’t exactly set the world on fire. It’s a shame the phone wasn’t smarter as there’s a mountain of features available. With around 32 apps to choose from, the phone is perfectly packed to make your on-the-go life that little bit easier.
In the end, the LG GD510 Pop teases you with the amount of features it’s got but never really delivers. It’s great for those who have never tested the touchscreen waters before but those who can spot a resistive screen from 12 paces may want to look elsewhere.
HTC HD2
HTC has stuck-firm with WinMo, now it's created the HD2 featuring a plethora of world’s firsts - it’s the first mobile with a whopping 4.3-inch screen, the first WinMo phone with a capacitive screen and more importantly - the first phone to make Windows Mobile work.
Take a closer look with our HTC HD2 hands-on review and video
The HD2 is also the first time HTC has used the Sense UI outside of the Android range, bringing with the likes of integrated Facebook status to your contacts and a Twitter client directly on the home screen.
In practice Sense on a WinMo phone is actually more of a mashup between HTC’s standard TouchFLO interface, seen on the likes of the HTC Diamond, and Sense, with elements like full screen weather updates and the tabbed homescreen browsing allowing a huge amount of information from the swipe of a finger.
And that finger swipe is a real pleasure - it’s easily as good as the iPhone, with every brush of the screen registering correctly.
We mentioned before that this phone makes Windows Mobile look like a good OS, and that’s not to say it’s terrible usually - there’s a lot of power behind it, but a poor user interface usually hides that behind a kaleidoscope of frustration.
Not so here - with HTC’s messaging widgets, email and texting is super easy to set up and even easier to read - simply flick through a pile of messages to see what’s been going on.
Media has also been improved for the HD2, and shows the power of the Snapdragon processor under the hood of the phone. Flicking through album covers to change songs is a dream, and when you turn the phone on its side, the system automatically moves in to Coverflow mode, and skimming through the pictures is thoroughly devoid of slow down.
Video is less appealing, which is a shame given the huge screen. It’s not bad to watch (and there’s always the irritating mobile version of Windows Media Player if you want it all in one place) but finding your way to your favourite movie is a convoluted process. You either have to scroll through all photos and videos you’ve taken before you get to it, or have to go through two separate album menus to get to the videos on your phone memory / memory card.
Video looks good enough in playback though, and the sensitivity of the screen means that scrolling backwards and forwards to find a certain point is very easy indeed.
Internet on the HD2 is also very good, although the functionality is divided over two built-in browsers. For Flash video, you’ll have to use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer - for pinch and zoom web browsing, you’re going to have to go with the default Opera browser.
But both offer a slick experience thanks to the uber processor and sensitive touchscreen, and saving relevant pages is nice and easy too.
As you can imagine, one of the strengths of Windows Mobile is its messaging prowess, and it shows that off well in the HD2. You can sync up to 10 email addresses into the phone, either from Exchange or IMAP and POP3, and all of them work on a push basis (providing, in the case of something like Google Mail) you have them correctly synced to the phone).
Typing messages is not such a fun experience though, as the Windows Mobile confusion shines through once more. The ‘Send’ key is located scarily close to the comma button, so on more than one occasion we ended up sending a message halfway through writing.
And while we’re talking about things that don’t really work that well, the camera could do with a bit of an upgrade too. While there are a huge amount of setting to play with, pictures still come out lacking detail and colour on most occasions, and the dual LED flash is brighter than the surface of the sun.
This means detail is not just washed out, but obliterated like a nuclear blast on many pictures. In fact this feature is only useful to scare your friends with how bright it gets.
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