The UK Mobile Phone Blog

LG GD900 Crystal: First Impressions!

With the dust barely settled from the announcement of the worlds first phone to feature a fully transparent keypad, Mobiles.co.uk have managed to get hold of an LG GD900 Crystal over a month before it’s officially due to launch here in the UK. Read on for our first impressions…

The feature that has everyone talking is without question the transparent touch pad so without wasting any time, let’s get stuck in. First things first, LG really aren’t kidding, the slide out keypad is completely see through. Made from a high quality plastic (though you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for glass), the keypad dispenses with physical buttons for full touch sensitive navigation. The numbers/ letters of the alpha-numeric keypad are etched into the plastic so you’ll have to rely on your sight, though this isn’t a problem as when the phone is switched on the keypad is completely illuminated. It’s difficult not to get carried away with the GD900 Crystal’s transparent keypad but put simply, it’s a work of art.

Not just a feast for the eyes, the keypad is also a joy to use. General input and dialing numbers is handled with ease whilst the more technical features are just as impressive. Gesture control is one of the GD900’s other celebrated features. Basically, drawing certain symbols on the touchpad acts as a shortcut. For instance, draw an ‘M’ and you will be taken to the music player. As if this isn’t impressive enough on its own, the fact that these are fully customisable opens the door for all sorts of fun and immaturity for creating your own shortcuts. The touchpad also doubles as a mouse for web browsing and again this works incredibly well. A drawback of conventional touchscreen phones is that your finger is in the way when you’re navigating but this isn’t the case with the GD900 Crystal so you can enjoy the excellent 3 inch display.

The excellent Crystal touchpad and 3.0 inch touchscreen would be nothing if the software wasn’t up to scratch so thankfully the GD900 runs flawlessly on S-Class. First seen on the Arena, S-Class UI presents users with a 3D menu styled as a cube. Swiping across the screen flicks to different sides of the screen and displays different applications such as multimedia and calling options. Similar to Symbian phones and Samsung’s TouchWIZ UI, S-Class puts all your most frequently used applications at your fingertips. Better still, because the touchscreen on the GD900 Crystal is capacitive (reacting specifically to the touch of your finger rather than a stylus), everything sticks to your fingertip like glue and flows fast and fluidly without any delay. In addition to the 3D cube, a traditional menu can also be opened which separates applications into categories and then lets you flick through. LG have been making alot of noise about the S-Class interface and after spending time using it, you start to realise why.

When a phone oozes as much style and class as the GD900 Crystal does, it’s often easy to assume that the features of the phone will suffer but this is where LG really have an ace up their sleeve. First and foremost, LG have packed in a world class camera. The 8.0 Megapixel camera is complimented by Autofocus, Face detection, digital zoom, a powerful LED flash and high resolution video capture. The camera in our sample wasn’t the finished article but was still quick, easy to use and produced some excellent photos. The multimedia player supports the usual range of different audio and video file formats including DivX and Xvid for high resolution video playback without clogging up your memory, not that you’ll need to worry as the GD900 Crystal supports up to 16GB of expandable memory (our sample had 240MB on board memory as well though LG are yet to confirm what the final product will include). Multimedia can be accessed with ease either via the S-Class UI or taking advantage of the gesture controls of the touchpad. Once open you can browse by artist, album, track and playlist and the lay out resembles that found on current gen iPods (not to mention the iPhone 3G) letting you flick through the album covers.

The GD900 Crystal also features HSDPA and Wi-Fi connectivity turning the phone into a capable web browser. Using multi touch technology, you can pinch the screen (or the keypad come to think of it) to zoom in or out on web pages and handwriting recognition allows you to input text on the touchpad whilst leaving the screen clear for your viewing pleasure. The handwriting recognition is very forgiving compared to similar software found on other phones and the fact it can be input on either the screen or the keypad is incredible. A-GPS can be used both for navigation and Geo-tagging photos though i was unable to test these at the time of writing.

From my time with the LG GD900 Crystal I’m almost lost for words at what LG have achieved. Not only does the Crystal look the part with the transparent keypad, it also performs brilliantly with the two touch sensitive navigation methods and a list of features that seems almost endless. Set to launch in May, the GD900 Crystal is sure to take the mobile world by storm. LG have raised the bar in both design and functionality and it will be interesting to see how the other big names (namely Samsung) compete.

Click here to keep updated on the LG GD900 Crystal.