LG GD900 Crystal camphone [printer-friendly] • reghardware

Original URL: http://www.reghardware.com/2009/08/05/review_phone_lg_gd900_crystal/

LG GD900 Crystal camphone

See-through styling – a clear winner?

5th August 2009 11:07 GMT

Review The LG GD900 Crystal wouldn't be the first mobile to sell itself on a gimmick. But in today's increasingly competitive market, a gimmick just isn't enough. The new Crystal's schtick is that it has a see-through keypad – as in, transparent.

LG's GD900 Crystal

It's not completely transparent of course, the numbers are displayed as grey etchings, which light up when the keypad is touched. And it's not just a keypad either, since it also doubles as a multi-function trackpad.

Also on board is a 3in touch screen, 8Mp camera, HSDPA 3G (7.2Mbps), quad-band GSM, Wi-Fi, the Symbian S60 operating system and LG's very cool S-Class user interface. So it's clearly more than just a pretty keypad.

The LG GD900 Crystal isn't the slimmest or lightest slider at 105 x 53 x 14mm and 120g but it's perfectly pocketable, nonetheless. The front is dominated by the 3in, 800 x 480 pixel, capacitive touch screen and above it are loudspeaker, VGA camera and light sensor. Below the screen are three touch-sensitive keys: call start and stop, plus a shortcut to the spinning cube version of LG's S-Class interface, which we last saw on the Viewty Smart [1].

Funky as the cube UI looks, we found it a bit of a pain to navigate around, and generally preferred to use the icon menu with its water drop themed buttons, which can be reached using one of the four onscreen buttons – phone, contacts, messages and menu. Around the sides are a micro USB slot (not LG's proprietary power slot, for once) protected by a plastic cover, volume rocker and camera shutter button, with a power/lock key on top.

The slider reveals the camera at the back

On the back, the camera lens is hidden behind the slide along with LED flash and self-portrait mirror. You'll need to remove the back to get to the microSD card slot. There's no card supplied, but it can handle up to 32GB – which is about as good as it gets – plus the GD900 features a generous 1.5GB of onboard memory.

The plastic battery cover is a sort of two-tone affair, black at the top, and clear at the bottom. With the slide recessed, the cover looks black against the battery, which can be clearly seen inside. Slide the phone apart and all becomes clear. This cover is the through plastic backdrop to the transparent keypad, which is glass, with a metal surround. Disconcertingly though, it feels a bit unbalanced when open, and much heavier at the top than at the hollow bottom.

The keypad also responds to gestures and can behave like a trackpad too

The 3in capacitive touch screen boasts 16 million colours, a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels and looks terrific. Not as terrific as the very new OLED screens can look in sunlight perhaps, but it'll stand with pretty much any other LCD we've seen. Both screen and keypad offer the same haptic feedback and, initially, vocal cues when you touch them. This carried on the watery theme with water drop sounds, but we soon switched them off for being too annoying.

It might sound like a gimmicky concept, but LG has at least been careful to make sure that the transparent keypad is, at least, functional. Bright sunlight causes some issues with legibility, however, the 'buttons' are well enough spaced that finding the correct keys isn't really an issue. General use aside, the keypad also offers a few neat tricks.

One of them is the 'Gesture Shortcuts'. This presents 12 shortcut moves that are assignable to nine different functions. To access them, you just draw the gesture figure on the key pad. So a triangle might bring up your contacts, a 'C' shape will take you back to the last screen, a circle will access games etc. it's a neat idea and works surprisingly well, recognising our scrawls unerringly each time we did them.

Handwriting recognition also comes off well on the touchpad, although you'll need to press an onscreen button to toggle between upper and lower case letters and numbers, which can slow you down.

Watery-themed icon menu in landscape mode

The onscreen keyboard is very decent too. In portrait mode it shows up as a T9-style keypad, but in landscape it goes full QWERTY. There's also an accelerometer on board which switches the resolution automatically when you tip the phone on its side. The keys are smallish, but haptic feedback and iPhone-style pop-ups mean mistakes are rare.

The 8Mp camera starts up in about four seconds after pressing the shutter button on the side. It offers maximum resolution of 3264 x 2448 pixels with autofocus and a 4x digital zoom which you can operate via the zoom buttons or by drawing a circle on the touchpad – another nice use of the keypad.

Camera settings menu

Settings are accessed by a virtual wheel on the screen and include multi-shot (five), timer (up to ten seconds), image stabilisation and face tracking. It doesn't have the Viewty Smart's fancy Schneider Kreuznach lens, and leaves out some features such as Intelligent Shot mode, but it's capable of some okay pictures.

There's more purple fringing than we'd like to see on the images, and edges aren't necessarily as sharp as they should be, but colours are fairly well represented and video recording wasn't bad either at 720x480 pixels and 30 frames per second.

Viewing pics or videos in the gallery is a bit of a treat too. You can view thumbnails in portrait mode, or a sort of 3D slideshow in landscape. It supports MPEG4, H.263, H.264 and WMV as well as DivX and XVid video formats and our samples played well on the screen. You can blow them up to full screen size and while we had no trouble with our MP4 files, some WMV files wouldn't play properly.

For music it will play MP3, AAC, AAC+, e-AAC+, WMA and Ogg-Vorbis audio tracks and offers an equaliser with 22 non-adjustable presets, plus the option of Dolby Mobile, which does something to focus the sound, but also makes the audio a little more compressed. The FM radio is the same as the one we last saw on the Viewty Smart, which means a swish touch-sensitive onscreen tuning dial, automatic station search, 30 presets and RDS.

Reasonable rather than remarkable camera with LED flash

Reception and sound quality were both pretty decent and the supplied headphones aren't bad, with their noise-dampening gromits and impressively deep if slightly uncontrolled bass. If you prefer you can use your own headphones as there's a 3.5mm adaptor, which plugs into the handset's micro USB slot. Alternatively, you can use a wireless pair, thanks to A2DP Bluetooth.

Sample Shots

Macro
Click for a full-resolution image [2]

Click for a full-resolution image [3]

Click for a full-resolution image [4]

Click for full-resolution image [5]

Before: no zoom
Click for a full-resolution image [6]

After: 4x digital zoom
Click for a full-resolution image [7]

Browsing on the LG GD900 Crystal is pretty good; just using the touch screen in the usual way to brush pages around and click on links. A really nice touch is that you can use the keypad as a trackpad and move a pointer around the screen, which can make it a lot easier to locate and activate hyperlinks, especially on busy pages. It's not something we'd use all the time, but it's handy to have the option. You can zoom by pinching the screen between forefinger and thumb, iPhone-style and we were able to view YouTube videos without any problems.

Alas, the call quality isn't crystal clear

Given all these good things, we were slightly disappointed by the call quality on the GD900, the speaker delivering a slightly metallic, thin sound when making calls. E-mail, however, proved easy to set up and there's support for Microsoft Exchange. It also comes with some fun motion-sensitive games.

The battery stood up reasonably well, giving us a good two days of calls plus camera, music and video use. Indeed, the 3in screen is just about big enough to make extended video playback worthwhile. A-GPS would have been nice, but it's not essential, and its omission is probably reflected in the price, which places it firmly in the midrange rather than the high end.

Verdict

So is the GD900 Crystal see-through keypad a gimmick? Well, yes and no. It's certainly designed to grab attention, but LG has also been clever enough to back it up with some genuinely useful functionality. It works perfectly well as a keypad but, if you don't like touch screens, you probably won't be keen on this either. Nevertheless, its trackpad operation is a boon; controlling what's on screen without messing it up with your pawprints, as well as delivering well-executed gesture shortcuts. All in all, it's a great little style phone that will turn heads, but won't embarrass you with a lack of functionality. ®