The LG Cookie Fresh really is a fresh new take on the stale LG Cookie design. Gone is the square, bloated look of the first touchscreen Cookie: in its place is a curvaceous, sleek handset that might even attract the eye of iPhone 3GS owners opposite you on the train. Is there much more to it than that though? Read our LG Cookie Fresh review to find out if it boasts brains as well as beauty.
Read the rest of our LG Cookie Fresh review
LG Cookie Fresh review
LG Cookie Fresh review: Music and media skills
LG Cookie Fresh review: Meet the rivals
When the postie rocked up at the door with the LG Cookie Fresh GS290, we thought it was set to be love at first sight with the handset. The cheery, compact packaging opened up to reveal a dinky phone (A shade under 13mm thick) with a delightful design and build. Although it’s pure plastic, it feels light, sturdy and expensive, with an eye pleasing trim of colour around the edges of the handset.
All the ports on the LG Cookie Fresh are placed where we’d want them: audio on top, memory card and USB on the sides and camera shutter button on the right too. The only thing that might confuse newcomers it the middle button: rather than acting as a confirm or home key, it opens up the system tray, so you can switch between programs. It’s actually quite useful when you figure it out, letting you flick between the web, Facebook, Twitter and other pre-installed applications with relative ease.
One difference original Cookie owners might spot with the LG Cookie Fresh is the lack of stylus. The first LG biscuit blower came with a stylus and a space for it to make tapping out text messages slightly easier for those with fat fingers. LG’s confident enough this time round that you won’t need one, and has left it out.
Is LG right to be so cocksure? We’d say so. Although the 3-inch screen is resistive (So it responds better to precise prods, like fingernail edges are stylus tips, rather than fingertips) the T9 on-screen keyboard layout is responsive enough with your fingers to bash out a text without much hassle. Unfortunately, there’s no full QWERTY keyboard, which would be tricky to pull off since there’s no accelerometer for tilting the screen into landscape mode.
More annoyingly though, symbols require two button presses to get to, making typing out a properly punctuated email on the LG Cookie Fresh a nightmare. Add to that the poor handling of mail downloading, and you’ve got a handset good for checking just the occasional message, and nothing more.
Battery life meanwhile proved to be something of a disappointment on the LG Cookie Fresh. Considering it uses a low resolution 400×240 panel, and there’s no 3G or Wi-Fi to slosh juice down the drain quickly, we were hoping for a power sipping phone that would see us through most of the week without a charge.
Unfortunately, the LG Cookie Fresh proved to be little more conservative with its power than the 3G connected Samsung Monte, running down over the course of two days’ sporadic use, with email turned on. Compare that to more powerful, multitasking 2G BlackBerrys continuously sucking down emails, and well, we’re not sure where it’s all being siphoned off.
That’s a shame as the LG Cookie Fresh might make a more attractive rival to the Samsung Genio Touch at the same price point on Pay As You Go otherwise. That mediocre battery stamina and frustrating email issues will prove dealbreakers for a lot of people, but if you’re confident you can plug it in every night, and simply want a bit of eye candy in your pocket, the LC Cookie Fresh will suit you just fine.
Read the rest of our LG Cookie Fresh review
LG Cookie Fresh review
LG Cookie Fresh review: Music and media skills
LG Cookie Fresh review: Meet the rivals
