LG Crystal GD900 – With a transparent glass keypad

Sexy looks have officially taken over ease of use, and a cell phone has to look sexy if it is to compete in the stiff gadget market. LG are desperate to do something out of the box with this cell phone and we were stunned at the transparent keypad of this handset. The keypad can also be used as a touch sensitive controller. For scrolling through the items on the phone, all you have to do is swipe your finger on it. This is just like a laptop’s trackpad. You can also ‘pinch’ on the keypad to zoom in and out of photos. All this seems too good to be true. We don’t know what the secret is but we surely must congratulate LG for this.

We really liked the LG Crystal GD900’s touch sensitive keypad. You can swipe on the keypad and look at the screen. Your view isn’t blocked while you swipe either. The phone has a slider interface, which means you can convinientaly slide the keypad out of sight when you don’t need it. The keypad supports touch sensitive gestures, for instance, drawing a circle launches an application like contacts. This function is programmable. The touch sensitive keypad along with the touch screen of the phone makes the whole thing quite ticklish.

LG Crystal GD900’s keypad is good for traditional dialing and typing too. We won’t recommend using the onscreen keyboard since it is quite terrible. It did not respond fast enough to our taps and there was frustrating lag in some cases. We also missed a few letters on some occasions and hence our messages didn’t make any sense at all. The phone has T9 predictive text but it doesn’t rescue you out of this mess. The keypad is best for typing messages.

LG Crystal GD900 has a eight megapixel camera and this phone is a proof that just because a camera has high resolution, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the photos are good. Our snaps has washed out colors and the details were lacking. In dim light conditions, the snaps had a lot of noise and photos with LED light had pinkish cast to them. The shutter speed is good, in bright light, snaps were taken in less than two seconds. But still, this camera doesn’t hold a candle to digital camera photos.

LG Crystal GD900’s camera editing options are pretty much similar to its predecessors. There are plenty of them and you can crop your stills for replacing the colors. Editing was easy and quick and the touch screen was exploited to the fullest. Be wary of the lag though, you need to wait a while for editing the images.

LG Crystal GD900 has video recorder which has an editor its own. You also get a music player and FM radio. For storing your photos, videos and pictures, there is 1.5 GB onboard memory and there is also a slot on the sides for additional memory.