LG Cookie - Cheapest Touchscreen Phone


Among several touch screen phones we now have a new one from LG. Based on the Viewty, which sports the Flash UI, the Cookie is said to be more powerful but with moderate features. The LG Cookie is the cheapest large touchscreen phone available in the market. It's got a niche market which it will attack with its aggressive pricing.




The phone, as of what I've seen, is pretty simple and its touchscreen is pretty responsive. The phone seems like it can create quite a stir in this time of touchscreen madness. With the XpressMusic 5800 selling at a much higher price, the Cookie could gain the spot of a value-feature touchscreen phone. Let's find out.

Bundle

LG KP 500 Cookie
Stereo Headset (No Sponge)
1GB microSD memory card
USB cable
Charger
Protection Film
Manual & PC Suite CD

Build & Design

The LG Cookie sports a very simple design but looks very plasticky. However, a better color finish would have made it look much better. The phone is light and isn't bulkier than any bar-type handset. 

On the face of the phone is a large three-inch screen. Above it you have the earpiece that also doubles up as the speaker of the phone, which is very loud and clear. The screen of the Cookie has poor sunlight legibility and it s hard to read when using it under the sun. However, the bundle provides a very good quality screen guard. It provides the needed protection without hindering the usage of the phone.



Below the screen there are three buttons; the center button is very similar to the Activity Menu seen in Sony Ericsson handsets and a button on either side are the calling buttons.


The left side of the phone has the connectivity/charger port which is shielded and a volume control. The placement of the volume control in the center doesn t seem too apt.


The keypad lock key on the right side of the phone is a really good addition. There is also the camera hotkey and a memory card slot well shielded against dust.


The top and the bottom of the phone don t have any buttons or connections. Near of the bottom of the phone is the stylus compartment.


At the back of the phone is the camera lens, which unfortunately does not have a cover for protection and is prone to scratches.

Overall the Cookie has a decent build and design.

Interface

Touch


The touch interface of the LG Cookie is good; most of it has been inherited from the LG Viewty - the first of its kind with flash UI from LG. The phone with regards to touch responsiveness has its set of mood swings. The phone at times acts responsive and at times pretty laggy, especially while scrolling. The layout of the menus and the shortcuts are all really good and so is the  dual home screen of the phone.



One screen can have widgets, which you can pull out of a hidden basket at the side.

You can drag them all and just shake the phone to arrange them auto. On the other home screen you can have up to nine favorite contacts. Touching any one would bring up the quick options, call message, etc. The LG Cookie has a built in accelerometer but it doesn t work too well. While messaging it takes its own sweet time when you switch the phone from portrait to landscape mode. This is pretty irritating and it carries on even in the web-browser of the phone.


Overall the touch interface needs some work, especially with its responsiveness. It s got much better than the Viewty but still needs work to get to the level of other feature phones in the market.

Input


The Cookie has few input options to offer. There is the obvious QWERTY, and three modes of handwriting recognition. The QWERTY keypad has small keys and at times you d find yourself hitting either two of them or the wrong one. I wasn t too comfortable with the QWERTY keypad. The handwriting recognition is also poor, it takes too much time to register an alphabet and ideally one would be able to write down two /three alphabets on other handsets with handwriting recognition.


The standard touch keypad was the best to use with T9 turned on. It was quick and registered touch well.

Application


The Cookie comes with some standard stuff for applications. The phone has good multi-tasking capabilities. It s got a document viewer for viewing office documents like .DOC, .XLS, and .PDF. The bundled games are good fun and can act as quite a time killer.

The web browser of the phone is also just average. Touching the screen for a couple of seconds would either zoom in or out of the web page. Tilting the phone to landscape would change the orientation of the web-browser but it was rather slow and at times needed a jerk for it to work. The Cookie has Java MIDP 2.0 support, so you can try installing several 3rd party applications but the compatibility is pretty poor and it could get annoying to use them.

Performance

Call Quality & Network
The call quality of the Cookie is average. I noticed call drops, especially when the battery was low. Otherwise with a Normal to Medium battery level, the phone is pretty stable.

Music & Video


On the music front, the LG Cookie is decent. The phone produces decent lows and mids but the highs could get irritating. I tried the earphones with a set of sponge (which weren t in the package) to help prevent them from falling off and also some filtering of high trebles. The phone misses a 3.5mm jack, so it s not possible to use your personal pair of headphones. There are few equalizer preset options provided in the music player application and no manual preset.

One thing that is noticeable is the loudness of the Cookie s speaker. It s really loud and hence I preferred to keep the phone on a silent profile for most of the time that I used it. The music player is pretty simple to use and has a good Now Playing screen. The only odd factor was that the music would stop if you hit the back on the Now Playing screen; instead it should just be going back to browsing where you left off.

The video player of the Cookie is very basic. There aren t too many options provided and the one missing the most is the aspect ratio options. Videos recorded could only be watched in its original resolution and couldn t be stretched to utilize the entire screen of the phone.

Camera


The Cookie has a 3.15MP camera without any light assistance. Seriously speaking I didn t expect the camera to produce very good images. The images come sharp only in broad daylight or spaces that are well lit. A missing flash is reason for poor images under poor lighting. The LG Cookie records video; at 320x240pixels 3GP format there s not much to complain.

Connectivity
The KP500 has simple connectivity options on board. There s GPRS and EDGE for surfing. The Bluetooth module is a 2.1 and supports stereo wireless headsets. The PC cable connectivity is a USB 2.0 and provides respectable transfer speeds.

Battery Life


The LG Cookie has a 900mAh battery with a specified talktime of 3.5hours. I put it into silent mode, set touch vibrations to Level 1 and activated power saver. After a complete charge I could extract from it  just under  two hours of talktime, add about two hours of music and 15-20min of GPRS usage all in a couple of days. The phone s battery meter initially doesn t show any signs of dropping but past the half level indication, the rest of it disappears quickly. Overall you can manage two days with the Cookie and if you re a heavy mobile user expect that to drop further.

Keeping the phone in silent and the vibration turned on, drains the battery pretty bad. I even tried turning off the vibration and switched to normal profile, which added another half day to the equation. Pretty impressive!



Price & Verdict



The LG Cookie KP500 is selling for around Rs.12,500 with a one-year warranty. The phone is a decent buy considering its main feature i.e. is a full-touch handset. If you look at it as a phone or a convergence device the Cookie isn't so sweet. It has a slow interface and lacks performance of most features that a phone at its price point would provide. I liked the phone for what it tries to achieve but won t recommend it for a demanding user.

If you really want a touch phone then I suggest you invest another 2-3K and pick the HTC Touch Viva or still better without extending your budget too far you can pick the Sony Ericsson G700. These phones have better features to offer other than the whole touch touch hype that you are after. Thanks to the iPhone craze.

Test unit sourced from LG
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