The LG Cookie Fresh can be had for as little as £65 on Pay As You Go, but even in this price range, there’s no reason to settle for a phone that doesn’t at least tries to sing and dance at the same time. We put the LG Cookie Fresh and its fancy touchscreen to the test, to see how it handles multimedia: read on for the verdict in this part of our LG Cookie Fresh review, and find out if it’s time to retire the iPod or not.
Read the rest of our LG Cookie Fresh review
LG Cookie Fresh review
LG Cookie Fresh review: Touchscreen, build and battery
LG Cookie Fresh review: Meet the rivals
On the design front, the LG Cookie Fresh ticks almost every box. The shell looks the part, and all the standard media bobbins are perfectly positioned. A volume rocker can be found on the left hand side (Though it doesn’t skip tracks), along with a microSD slot, which should let you store up to 32GB of music and media (We tested it with an 8GB card). The slot’s placing is certainly welcome as it means you don’t have to yank out the battery to switch memory cards.
Over on the right, you’ll find a dedicated camera button, and a micro USB port for loading the LG Cookie Fresh up with tunes and videos. It’s behind an annoying hinged door, but we can let that slide when it keeps the lovely look of the phone in check, and there’s a 3.5mm audio slot on the top of the phone, so you can simply pop in your own headphones and shove it on your pocket, with no danger of anything snapping when you pull it out again just as suddenly.
The main drawback is the camera. It’s a barebones, two megapixel affair (Which means poxy QVGA for video) on the LG Cookie Fresh, with no flash, and unsurprisingly we couldn’t get anything acceptable out of it except in broad daylight. It’s not that slow to process shots, but there’s no option to send photos to online services, like Facebook. Par for the budget phone course, sure, but it’s all a bit disappointing when the original LG Cookie, which came out well over a year ago, had a three megapixel sensor inside.
Things aren’t so great on the the software front either. The LG Cookie Fresh runs a stripped down S-Class UI as found in the more flashy LG Arena, so you may know what to expect by now: lots of carousels and little actual functionality. The media software on board is fine for the most part, letting you slide through music and pictures easily, with track info and cover art in place. There’s also a music player widget with controls you can place on one of the homescreens – though only one. That’s not ideal, as there are three different home panes and a main menu, so we’d prefer it to persist throughout them, especially since you can’t use the volume rocker to pause and skip through tracks.
Video playback on the LG Cookie Fresh is a bit more disappointing. While movies and TV shows don’t do wonders for the battery life, they look colourful enough on the 400×240 screen. The problem of course, is getting them on there in the first place: though it supposedly plays MP4 files, we couldn’t get any of varying codecs and resolutions to run. Instead, you’ll have to convert them to 3GP – and since there aren’t any instructions in the manual explaining how to do so, there’s too many hurdles in place to realistically use the LG Cookie Fresh for your own downloads often.
Most tragically though, the lack of any speedy web connection rules out any video streaming from the web, which the similarly priced Samsung Genio Slide handles without breaking a sweat. The LG Cookie Fresh has no 3G or Wi-Fi, so you can forget about peeping YouTube clips or BBC iPlayer shows on the move.
Truth be told, online connectivity aside, the LG Cookie Fresh is at least on a par with the smallest, cheapest Android phones, with a sharper screen than some, and the same music syncing (or lack thereof) skills. However, low price Samsung rivals best it with easier video playback. We just wish they looked as good as the LG Cookie Fresh.
Read the rest of our LG Cookie Fresh review
LG Cookie Fresh review
LG Cookie Fresh review: Touchscreen, build and battery
LG Cookie Fresh review: Meet the rivals
