LG Secret first impressions

The Secret is out. LG's third Black Label phone hits the shops later this month, and offers the stylish good looks and packed feature set of its Chocolate and Shine stablemates.

The slick design of the Secret certainly lives up the the Black Label reputation. The 'unscratchable' tempered glass front, patterned back panel, solid build and confident sliding mechanism give the phone a real premium look and feel, and the fact that only four buttons are visible on the black front fascia make the Secret look sleek and stylish.

The black area around the main selection key comes to life when the keypad is activated or the phone slid open, with six touch-sensitive buttons for the four nav keys and the left and right selection keys. Like any touch-sensitive keypad, these take some getting used to, but a slight vibration in response to a key press along with ripples of light emanating from the button help you get used to the keypad's sensitivity.

The 240x320-pixel screen itself is also touch sensitive, but only in certain modes. Pressing a button on the edge of the phone activates the Touch Media menu, and most new users will head straight to the centre of the menu and open the M-Toy applications.

M-Toy is a set of motion-sensitive games in which you shake, tilt, flick or wave the Secret to toss a dart, hit a baseball, catch a fish, throw a hammer or navigate a maze - think Wii Sports for mobile. The games are fun and mildly diverting, but with the display and control pad being one and the same, it's difficult to see what you're doing when the screen is swishing around in front of you. It's a good showcase for the Secret's motion-sensitivity, anyway.

Other Touch Media apps are the music player and radio, a document reader and the photo viewer application, although if you've used the iPhone's photo app then the zoom and scroll tools will seem clunky and frustrating, and the automatic screen orientation from landscape to portrait takes a long time to kick in.

The phone's camera meets the current 5-megapixel ante, and its autofocus is complemented by an audible beep so you don't shoot too soon. The LED flash is more useful than the usual LED lighting, and there's a host of editing tools, from the useful (rotate & resize) to the fun (add frames and clipart) and the novel (a face-detecting Morph feature). Sadly there's no way of altering image brightness, contrast or colour once an image has been saved, but the full complement of white balance, brightness and ISO settings are available from viewfinder mode.

The Secret's physical keypad is an improvement on earlier Black Label keys. The keys are low-profile, but you do need to give them a click so there's no danger of press the wrong key, Chocolate-style. The interface will be familiar to LG users, although it doesn't take too much of a stretch to migrate from Nokia or Sony models, and the predictive text on the Secret is among the most intuitive - and fastest learning - that I've used.

Other software features are slightly disappointing - the browser insisted on displaying some pages - notably the BBC's mobile website - in their full sized versions rather than displaying slimmed down pages, forcing you to scroll awkwardly horizontally as well as vertically.

Motion sensor apart (and this has to be seen as a novelty rather than a useful function for now), the LG Secret is hardly a revolutionary mobile but it slides nicely into the company's Black Label range and its sleek design and solid build gives it the desirability factor, while its all-round performance and feature set lifts it out of the pure fashion niche.