LG Intouch Max GW620

Product: LG Intouch Max GW620
Website: www.lge.com/lggw620
System Specifications: 3-inch touchscreen, Android, 5 megapixel camera, microUSB, microSD, 3.5mm jack, 3G, GPRS, GPS, GSM, HSDPA, Bluetooth, WiFi, Li-ion battery
Price: Free on a £20 contract, £270 SIM Free

LG HAS JOINED the 21st century and the ranks of nearly every mobile phone manufacturer by releasing its first Android handset with the LG GW620 with the budget concious in mind.

Lucky Goldstar's initial outing in this market is a touchscreen mobile with a physical qwerty keyboard.

LG's GW620 display is a 3-inch 320x480 HVGA resistive touchscreen that could easily pass as a capacitive touchscreen due its responsiveness. There wasn't the violent stabbing with a digit needed to elicit a response as seen on other handsets with a similar screen, instead the touch action was well executed. The colours were fairly sharp and the image quality was decent enough, although we feel the screen could have been larger to support its usefulness in both media playback and general usability but this would have certainly upped the price of the phone.

Around the sides of the viewable screen is a lot of wasted space in which an 3.2-inch display might have been housed. At the base of the screen there are 10mm of wasted area for an LG logo with another 5mm of wasted space at the top.

Beneath the display are the home screen and return buttons along with a physical menu key. A 'magnifying glass' search button is missing, although that's become a staple of Android handsets thanks to built-in access to the Google search engine. It isn't entirely absent, but it's been relocated to the slide-out qwerty keyboard where it's still usable as most people will use the phone in landscape mode when searching.

The GW620 has a very similar look to the Motorola Dext we reviewed last year. The LG handset is shorter and slimmer at 109mm by 54.5mm by 15.9mm thick.

The GW620 physical qwerty keyboard has five rows of keys with the cursor keys integrated. It feels comfortable to use, and the cursor keys mimic what's on a computer keyboard and are located on the right. The keyboard is a good size with plenty of room for the keys, as just over 15mm of the base is located under the screen when the keyboard is exposed, allowing for bigger keys. The only critique we had was far too many normally used keys were only accessible by pressing another key. The comma key was one of those, along with the @ sign, but the full stop was accessible.

The GW620 runs Google Android 1.5. This slightly older OS is a bit of a customised roll out with some minor changes by LG. The icons to the applications have been tweaked, not by much but just enough to distinguish the OS from a vanilla deployment.

LG has bundled in a home-screen selector that either offers the default Android theme or an LG skin to the basic Google OS. This doesn't offer much in the way of real change other than a few tweaks here and there. Running with the LG theme adds a dialer, contacts, text messaging and applications icon to the base of all the home screens no matter which one is selected. Also, scrolling through the three Android home screens doesn't ever stop as there is a continual loop from screen to screen.

Several face-tagging features have been added, including auto-detection in photos once a person has been tagged and what LG calls 'face to action' which lets you call or message a contact by tapping their tag in an image.

That, along with all the applications now listed under the categories communications, multimedia, utilities, Google and downloads are all that LG has brought to the table in terms of the customisation of Android.

LG has bundled in some extra software on the GW620 to get around the foibles of Android 1.5 and to bring the handset up to par in order to compete with other Google mobile phones. First up are some applications from Moxier for accessing Microsoft Exchange servers from the LG phone. These get around the lack of decent native support for the corporate email world in this version of the Android OS. The Moixer push email client is used for accessing Exchange email servers, including support for synchronising calendars, contacts and tasks. This is all very well and good if there's a need to access the company email, but it's not useful for the non-corporate consumer.

Rather disappointingly, the company has said it has no plans to update the phone to even Android 1.6, never mind 2.0 or 2.1 to bring it up to date with most of today's Andoird based devices.

Lucky Goldstar has thrown in some social networking software so as not to leave the tweeters and facebookers out in the cold. SNS manager, or social network services manager is an application that can access Facebook, Twitter and Bebo accounts then pool the information together plus provide updates. This software acts and feels very much like an early version of the individual clients found on the Android market, with few frills to excite. The update notifications are limited too, with 30 minutes being the shortest automatic polling time, whereas using the separate applications is preferable. This doesn't compare too favorably with similar applications available on competing smartphones, but it's better than nothing and there is underlying potential.

On the right-hand side of the GW620 is the usual quick-launch camera app button at the bottom, and just above that is a button for quick launching the music application. At the top is a small flap which covers the microSD slot. This might not be to everybody's taste, but some favour quick access to the memory card for adding media. This easy access is much better than removing the back of the case or even the battery. We added a couple of pieces of XviD video on the 1GB microSD card provided, as the mobile apparently has out of the box support for that while none of the media we regularly use could be played.

On the top of the handset is a 3.5mm audio jack located off centre to the right with the phone's power button just before that. On some other phones the audio socket is dead centre and awkward to use whilst typing on the keyboard, as the hand has to be clumsily wrapped around the audio jack to properly hold the mobile with both hands. This can be avoided with this audio jack's location, for which we must praise LG as nearly everyone else makes the same mistake.

Power comes from a 1500 mAh battery, chargeable from the microUSB port located on the top left. In our tests the phone lasted for 6 hours of continuous calls, which is reasonable enough for a day's use of chatting, websurfing, tweeting and Facebook checking from time to time.

In Short
The LG GW620 is, in the company's own words to the Inquirer, a phone "aimed at 16-24 year olds who would like to buy a smartphone but have been previously priced out of the technology." Although it's not a budget model, to LG which has produced luxury handsets for Prada, it probably is. However it isn't a budget handset, it's a good, solid design for LG's first Android mobile phone but it's marred as a fairly lacklustre example of an Android smartphone with few frills or enticements to thrill. However, if what you're looking for is a decent basic Android smartphone, it's worth looking at the GW620. µ

The Good
Good effort for LG's first Android handset, responsive resistive touch screen, decent qwerty keyboard, good location for 3.5mm audio jack.

The Bad
Social networking services manager.

The Ugly
Older Android version, little customisation and few extra features put into it.

Bartender's Report
7/10