LG Crystal GD900 review

There’s one principal question to ask when faced with the LG Crystal GD900- what’s with that transparent keypad?

Can we take it seriously, when it’s surely one of the most gimmicky features we’ve laid our eyes on so far this year? Is it pointless? Does it reduce the LG Crystal to little more than a joke?

Well, as it happens, no. It doesn’t make the LG Crystal the must-have hit of the summer, but crucially it doesn’t feel like a cheap tacked-on addition. Not entirely, anyway.

It uses a capacitive touchscreen, the same type used on the main 3-inch touchscreen. As such, it’s responsive to the lightest of finger touches. However, although it’s designed to be used as a traditional numerical keypad, it’s not the function we found it most useful for. After all, without the real tactile feel of buttons, you might as well just be tapping away on the main screen.

Instead, we preferred using it with the camera and browser, where it devolves from being a keypad to something even simpler- just a touch control interface that’s not the main screen. In the camera, you can zoom in and out with a circular motion on the transparent keypad, and it can be used to navigate around web pages.

We didn’t rue that fact that numbers are printed on the keypad, since it’d look and seem even stranger without them. It’s just that we found the main screen perfectly fine to use for typing in numbers. Part of our favouring of the main touchscreen is that when held like a slider phone, the weighting of the LG Crystal isn’t quite right, with the keypad end being a little too light for comfort. This is the only part of the Crystal that really made us feel that the phone’s little more than an Arena with a transparent keypad sellotaped on.

Once you’ve got over the ‘oooh, ahhhh, errrrr?’ factor that’s a built-in feature of the transparent touchscreen, you’ll find that elsewhere the LG Crystal bears a striking resemblance to stable mates the Viewty Smart and Arena. It uses the S-Class Cube interface that’s based around a series of four customisable home screens and a main menu that’s got just about everything you’d need day-to-day on your phone.

To customise the home screens, which feature shortcuts, widgets, contacts and multimedia items, you just hold your finger down on the screen to enter the 'edit' mode. Each of the four screens features a single type of content, but you can easily swap between the screens with a quick horizontal swipe on the screen. You can also change which home screen your phone defaults to within the menu.

Making the most of the handset involves a bit of tinkering, and giving the home screens a wallpaper facelift requires a delve into the menu – you can’t do it from the screens themselves. Having seen it on a couple of LG phones already, we’re quite used to the S-class interface and find it highly usable, as much so here as on the Arena or Viewty Smart.

Unfortunately, the camera doesn’t quite manage to compete with the best LG has in its range. It’s an 8-megapixel offering, but lacks the sharpness and detail of previous LG phones such as the Renoir. The ability to set the camera’s ISO rating manually is a nice touch, but we found lower-light images to be quite grainy, regardless of this setting. It’s still a capable camera, just not quite up to the heights LG has previously reached. Connectivity options on offer cover every base though, with Wi-Fi, EDGE and HSDPA 7.2 Mbps available.

At 1.5GB, the included internal memory isn’t hugely impressive, but considering the low price of high capacity microSD cards, which can be slotted in underneath the Crystal’s backplate, this is no big issue.

For a phone with a clear focus on style, and the curious innovations of its slide-out transparent keypad, the LG Crystal is an impressively capable handset. Our only concern is that it’s got direct competition from a pair of LG heavyweights in the form of the Arena and Viewty Smart, which feature the same interface and the same sized screen, but are both cheaper and a bit slimmer.

Much as we found legitimate uses for the slide-out keypad, unless you’re truly enamoured with the idea of it, we can’t help but recommend you save a few pennies and opt for one of these more conventional phones.