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Review: LG Cookie mobile phone

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lg kp500 cookie 1
lg kp500 cookie 1

Various mobile phone
manufacturers have tried to play catch up with the Apple iPhone. But of
course, every time someone gets near, the Cupertino company seems to put
its foot down and head off into the distance. LG is one such vendor,
but will its Cookie touchscreen phone take the biscuit?

The
Cookie, also known as the KP500, is a medium-priced mobile designed to
suit most people. The touchscreen handset is lightweight and thin,
measuring 11.9mm deep by 55.4mm wide by 106.5mm long. It weighs in at a
size zero 89g.

There are four available colour options ranging from black and brown to gold and silver.
It is no surprise that the design of the phone takes its cue from the LG KC910 Renoir. But feature-wise, it is a different beast.

The
screen is surprisingly large (240 by 400 resolution – 3-inch TFT 262k
colour touchscreen) and takes up virtually all of the front panel. Of
course, it sports three physical buttons on the front. The screen also
rotates to landscape view when tilted, using the accelerometer.{mospagebreak}For some reason, the handset also comes with a stylus, if you can’t be
bothered to use your fingers. The reason for the inclusion is that the
phone features handwriting recognition.

A modern phone would not be complete with some mp3 player and it does
not disappoint with a media player that supports a wide range of audio
and video playback formats (which include MP3, WMA and AAC but oddly
not Divx or Xvid). Organising files on the phone is relatively easy and
quite intuitive for transferring files between phone and computer using
the connectivity options available. It also features an FM radio should
you get bored of what is on your phone. That side with 8GB of storage,
it is more for playing your fave tunes when working out at the gym
rather than being able to carry all your music wherever you are. It
lacks a standard 3.5mm jack which can be annoying if you have a really
good set of earphones you want to use with the phone – instead you have
to use the proprietary earphones.

The 3.2-megapixel camera is workmanlike but hardly breath-taking. That
side, it is better than Apple’s efforts in this department.

The
phone has handy call features for managing contacts and its call
logging is on par with the best on the market. Otherwise call quality
was good.{mospagebreak}The hands-free feature sounds crisp when in use, but as with most
phones, using this will eat up more juice than when in normal mode.

It can accept up to 8GB in storage with a MicroSD card. There is 48MB of onboard storage, which we felt could have been more.

It has Bluetooth and A2DP for connecting to Bluetooth headsets and other devices.

The phone can handle POP3 email accounts, which is good for Gmail and
other webmail services. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to support
Microsoft Exchange, so might be limited to consumers rather than
business. This is a shame as the device could with a handy document
viewer.

What is rather a let down is the mobile web browser. It doesn’t render
web pages properly. And we thought Mobile Internet Explorer 6 was bad.

While the Cookie comes in as a cheap touchscreen phone, it misses so
many of the features that a touchscreen smartphone should have or at
least should have if wanting to be considered an iPhone killer.That said as a basic phone, it’s OK.

Rating: 6.5/10

Features and pictures on next page…{mospagebreak}Key Features

3-inch TFT 262k colour touchscreen (240 by 400 resolution)
Touchscreen handwriting recognition
Bluetooth Technology
48MB expandable to 8GB MicroSD memory card
FM Radio with RDS
3.2-megapixel camera with video support

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