LG Crystal GD900 -Unlocked- A Phone With Two Touch Screens
Sum and Substance:
Thumbs Up:
Great looks, HSDPA and Wi-Fi connectivity, multi touch screen.,
Thumbs Down:
Great looks but fails to impress on the inside, 8 MP camera is bad quality, the phone is unlocked which means it is expensive.
Inside the Trunk:
Technology: WCDMA (UMTS) / GSM
Band: WCDMA (UMTS) / GSM 850/900/1800/1900
Phone design: Slider
Caller ID: Yes
Other features: Music player, camera, transparent keypad, FM radio.
The Whiz Kid Speaks:
The display of the LG Crystal GD900 is 3 inch big, gives a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels and supports up to 16.2 million colors. Recognized audio formats are AAC, MP3, WMAPro, AMR, WMA and Ogg Vorbis and only H.263 video format is recognized.
On the back of the phone there is a 8 mega pixel camera with 16X digital zoom. The video recorded resolution is 720 x 480 pixels. The phone comes with 1.5 GB internal memory and microSD card slot for further expansion.
Razzle Dazzle:
LG Crystal GD900 is a down right sexy looking phone, no doubt about it. It has this great looking tempered glass and and there is a bluish light effect on the edges. We haven’t a phone as pretty as this in a long time. The phone has a slider interface and there is a touch sensitive keypad beneath the phone. The keypad is transparent which adds to the attractiveness of the phone. The phone has two touch screens, one being the touch screen display and the other being the keypad.
Inside Dope:
LG Crystal GD900 is a beautiful phone but once you get used to it and the novelty wears off, you will wish it had better performance. It will make heads turn when you flaunt it on your college or office campus but then on the inside you will realize that it is not as good. LG has taken pains for the phone to look good and haven’t cared much about the performance inside. We couldn’t get enough of the looks though; we were staring at it for long time when it landed in our test centers.
The display of the LG Crystal GD900 is 3 inch, 800 x 480 pixels resolution and support for 16.2 million colors. The display is as big as iPhone and performs equally well. The text is clear, the photos and videos look lively on the phone.
Beneath the LG Crystal GD900 is a keypad that we seldom see in a mobile phone. It is a touch sensitive keypad which lets you scroll through your web pages even with a swipe on the finger. Yes! Can do swiping even on the keypad of the screen and the screen will react accordingly. The phone even has multi touch interface so you can pinch the keypad and zoom in and out of web pages on the screen. We were happy with this feature because your view won’t be blocked when you are swiping the pages. It is just like using buttons, only sleeker. The feature is cool but we think it is more of a gimmick to attract attention.
The keypad supports gestures, just like mouse gesture that you see on Opera browser in computers. Gestures in Opera are used to open and close windows; in here it is used to open new applications. For example if you draw a circle it will open up your contact list. We were again amused by this feature where in just moving our fingers around in the screen made the phone open applications. The catch is that the keypad is too touch sensitive. If you don’t draw an exact circle and accidentally do something else, the phone might think you want to open some other application and it will do that.
We had similar problem with the three touch sensitive button below the display. They were too sensitive to touches.
For inputting of text there are two ways, the onscreen keyboard and the touch sensitive slide out keypad. We were uncomfortable using both because there was no segregation of buttons on the keypad and we often hit neighboring keys (we don’t blame the small size of the keys for this, big mobile phone buttons will make the phone even bigger). The keyboard on the touch screen had too tiny buttons and we had mis hits quite a lot of time. If there were physical keys which separated each other with proper edges, typing would have been better.
The keyboard on the screen is pain in the neck, it sometimes refused to register our touches and we had no option but to press again or press harder out of frustration. T9 text is included and it makes matters even worse with over whelming suggestions. You cannot even make this suggestions disappear. The keypad looks great, the display looks great but it disappoints with such simple features.
We were looking forward to testing the eight mega pixel camera on the back of the LG Crystal GD900. 8 mega pixel cameras are rare on camera phones and when they do make an appearance; manufacturers claim that the phone is a replacement for your digital camera.
Well, the quality of pictures in nowhere close to the eight mega pixel rating. Photos didn’t look as great as expected from an 8 MP lens. The photos looked washed out, they were lacking in detail. We have seen 5 MP camera phones perform better.
Other features on the LG Crystal GD900 include a 1000 memory phone book, GPRS (General Packet Radio Service), EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates For Global Evolution), WAP 2.0, XHTML Browser, PDF support, Microsoft PowerPoint support and Microsoft Excel support
Editing options on the camera save some face, as there are lots of options for editing your photos. Editing is easy as it exploits the presence of the touch screen. Saving edited photos take a while though, so this phone is not for people who lack patience. The camera also lets you save videos but just like the photos, the quality is passable. You can record in maximum resolution of 720 x 480 pixels and it has 16X digital zoom.
The LG Crystal GD900 has built in music player and FM radio. For storing your music files there is a huge 1.5 GB internal memory and you can also add more with the provided microSD slot. The music player can play formats of AAC, MP3, WMAPro, AMR, WMA and Ogg Vorbis. Music quality was average on the phone. H.263 video is the only video format supported.
Just like LG Arena KM900 this phone also has S-Class user interface for the display. It lets you have multiple screens and you can scroll through them. This is usefull as it lets you store more shortcuts for applications and multiple home screens is anytime welcome as compared to a single one but the spinning cube sometimes feels irritating. There are some applications like weather, for which you have to click on it to check the weather. There is a short cut bar but it showed shinning sun no matter what the weather outside was.
We thought the browser was one of the best features of the LG Crystal GD900. It also takes full advantage of the touch screen and the touch sensitive transparent keypad. You can zoom in and out of the pages by pinching on the multi-touch touch screen display or the transparent keypad. Surfing the web was great thanks to the big screen.
1000 mAh battery of the LG Crystal GD900 was good, it lasted for 360 minutes for talk time and had 300 hours of stand by time.
Nitty Gritty:
LG Crystal GD900 has superb looks but once the novelty wears off you will realize that you must not judge a book by its cover. Think twice about buying this phone even if looks are important for you, the over sensitive display, aw full camera and other such disappointing features tell us you should look elsewhere.
