The LG KP500 Cookie is a new device boasting to be the UK’s cheapest touchscreen handset. With a large 3″ screen and a 3 megapixel camera, the KP500 should be a tempting proposition to anyone that wants a more affordable alternative to the iPhone. We take a closer look to see if the Cookie crumbles…
Physical Aspects
The LG Cookie comes in the standard tablet style that many recent touchscreen handsets have adopted. This gives the device a simplistic look, with the 3″ touch-sensitive display dominating the front. Measuring a respectable 106.5mm x 55.4mm x 11.9mm (4.2″ x 2.2″ x .5″) and weighing a mere 89g (3.1oz), the Cookie easily slides into a pocket or handbag.
The display is capable of showing 256,000 colors and has a WQVGA resolution of 240 x 400 pixels. It’s also quite bright, allowing for decent legibility in sunny conditions. Below it are three square buttons with chrome edges. The buttons comprise the ‘Call/Send’ button, favorite/running apps button, and ‘End’ button. Around the display is a glossy black surround that houses the LG logo, with the rest of the front being clad in soft-touch plastic.
The rear shares this soft touch finish, and houses the lens for the 3.0 megapixel camera. The lower half of the rear cover slides off to reveal the battery and SIM card slot, and features an embossed LG logo. The front and rear of the device are separated by a metallic silver band that loops around all four edges of the handset. The top and bottom of the device are completely bare, aside from the microphone pinhole on the bottom edge.
The sides of the Cookie house the remaining few buttons, with the volume rocker on the left and the camera shutter and screen lock buttons on the right. I found the screen lock button to be too flush with the casing to allow easy operation. It usually took a few jabs at the side of the device before I managed to unlock the screen. There’s also a covered microSD(INFO) slot on the right and the device’s proprietary headset/data/charging multi-port on the left. Hidden in the bottom right corner of the device is the extendable stylus that, unusually, slides out of the device sideways. The stylus is quite short at 76mm, but the phone can be operated with a finger for most tasks, so it’s rarely needed.
Overall, the LG Cookie is a decent-looking device, though is a little boring and lacks any real design flare. However, thanks to extensive use of soft-touch plastics, it does feel quite nice in the hand and stays fingerprint-free, aside from the screen.
Core Functions
The LG Cookie’s call quality was quite good, with callers being clearly audible and with plenty of volume. There was no fuzz or hiss, and the speakerphone worked well too, though callers could hear an echo of themselves at higher volumes. The Cookie’s reception was also good, often showing full signal and never once dropping a call.
LG claim that the Cookie’s 900mAh battery gives the device 350 hours of standby time, or 3.5 hours of talk time. During our tests we averaged around 2 days on a single charge. Our usage was quite average, with the device set to check for email every 2 hours, plus about 20 SMS per day and the odd short call or use of the camera. Unfortunately, the device’s battery gauge was useless, and stayed on full for much of its life, before quickly dropping down and running out of juice. Sometimes the device didn’t even warn me about the low battery until a minute or so before it ran out of power.
The Cookie’s contacts system was simple and easy to use. Multiple phone numbers and email addresses can be held, as well as lots of other info such as home address, birthday, and a memo. You can also assign contacts their own picture and ringtone, and group contacts together. The contacts search system works well and searches by both first and last names at once. There is also a search function in the dialing screen, though this only allows you to find contacts by entering part of their phone number, and not by searching their name.
Voice dialing is not supported on the LG Cookie, but thankfully speed dialing is. Users can customize one of the two standby screens with up to 8 contact shortcuts, allowing you to dial, send SMS, or edit each contact from a thumbnail picture on the screen.
Profile support on the LG KP500 was good, with plenty of customization on offer. There is also the option to create new profiles, should you wish. Profile options include; ringtone, message tone, vibrate mode, increasing ring, and startup/shutdown sounds. The included ringtones are all quite upbeat, and MP3s can also be used as ringtones. It’s possible to quickly switch to silent mode by long-pressing the downwards arrow on the volume rocker.
Messaging on the Cookie seemed good the first time that I used the device. The messaging system was easy to use and MMS messages can be created from the SMS composer by simply adding images, video, or sound. The keypad input method can even be exchanged for a full QWERTY(INFO) keyboard, simply by rotating the device counter-clockwise. However, just like when I reviewed LG’s Viewty, the Cookie seemed to slow down as I was composing a message. Therefore I had to drastically slow my text input to prevent the Cookie from missing characters as it caught up with my typing.
Worse still, was the Cookie’s T9 dictionary function. There was no way to quickly flick through predicted words, and users instead have to tap on a drop-down box and select the word they want from a list. As you can imagine, this made messaging pretty slow. Not only this, but the T9 system often made frustrating mistakes such as canceling a word when it was selected, and didn’t seem to include many partial-word alternatives like rival T9 systems.
Unfortunately, this problem only became worse within the email composer. Adding a new word would, strangely, return the cursor to the bottom of the email, which meant I had to scroll back to the top of the message to find where I’d entered my text. Also, the device seemed very unresponsive in the email application, so scrolling back to the top of the message wasn’t as easy as one might expect either - even when using the stylus. The Cookie does at least support both IMAP(INFO) and POP3(INFO) email accounts, although unfortunately does not feature Instant Messaging. Overall I was very dissatisfied with the LG Cookie’s messaging capabilities.
The LG Cookie is a 2G(INFO) handset, which means it isn’t the ideal candidate for services such as web browsing and email. Nor does it have WiFi(INFO), so web browsing is limited to GPRS/Edge connection speeds instead. It does, however, include Bluetooth A2DP for transferring files and connecting Bluetooth handsfree kits and stereo headsets. The KP500 can also connect to a computer via a USB cable that is included in the sales package.
Multimedia / Applications
The KP500 Cookie has a 3 megapixel camera, beating the iPhone’s lowly 2 megapixel unit. However, like the iPhone it also lacks autofocus and a flash, so low-light photography and close-ups are a no-go. On the whole though, I was actually quite impressed with the Cookie’s camera quality. With good light, the camera takes some pretty nice shots. There is a bit of noise in darker areas, but photos generally looked sharp and well colored. I do question the choice of positioning the camera lens in the top corner though, as the natural position for your fingers to sit when using the camera causes them to obscure the lens.
Unfortunately, I cannot report about the video recording abilities of the Cookie in such a positive manner. The video is recorded at QVGA resolution (320 x 240 pixels) and encoded as a 3gp file. Therefore the image quality is poor, and the videos aren’t really suitable for anything other than viewing on the device itself. To top it all off, the frame rate is very low, so video playback is very jerky.
Viewing photos and videos in the gallery was generally a better experience. Looking through your snaps was dealt with by intuitive finger swipes across the screen, and photos slid across the screen quite smoothly. The gallery viewer opens up in landscape mode, but it is possible to view the photos in portrait mode, simply by rotating the phone. It is also possible to edit photos from the gallery with a basic application that allows you to draw on your photos, add text, and stamp shapes, plus edit things like white balance, contrast, colors, and levels.
Web browsing on the LG KP500 requires a great deal of patience, as you’d expect from the GPRS/EDGE connection speeds. Once loaded, pages were displayed well, with images and animations mostly being displayed without issue. Pages are loaded to fit the screen width, which gives a good view of the page, but renders most items too small to read. To zoom in, a long press is required on the desired item, which is then sized to fit the screen. As with the photo gallery, it is possible to rotate the device to display web pages in landscape mode, courtesy of the Cookie’s built-in accelerometer.
For music fans, the Cookie includes an MP3 player with playlist creation and album art support. The player features a good library function, allowing you to browse music by track, artist, album or genre, or to simply enter shuffle mode for a random selection of songs. Sound quality from the handset seemed good, but was drastically let down by the naff ["useless" -editor] headphones included in the sales package. Unfortunately, there is no standard 3.5mm headphone jack on the Cookie, so an adapter or a set of headphones with LG’s multi-port connection are required. The included headphones lacked bass and wouldn’t stay in my ears, but did include a microphone for making/receiving calls handsfree.
Thanks to the Cookie’s Bluetooth support with A2DP(INFO), a set of Bluetooth stereo headphones can be connected. This enables use of a wider variety of headsets and gets rid of annoying wires in the process. Bluetooth can also be used to send music across to the phone from a PC or Mac, or alternatively this can be done more quickly via the USB connection. The LG Cookie can be connected in either Mass Storage mode to load up the memory card, or ‘Music Sync’ mode that allows the Cookie to synchronize with Windows Media Player 10 or 11.
It is also possible to play videos on the LG Cookie, but I found the quality to be quite poor, offering jerky playback at best. Should you be more of an FM radio fan, the Cookie has you covered, but the wired headset must be connected to function as an antenna. Both video and music playback (including the FM radio) can be listened to via headphones or the device’s built-in loudspeaker.
To round off the Cookie’s abilities, LG have packed-in some personal information management applications and a handful of games. You get an organizer, alarms, voice recorder, drawing panel for scribbling notes and doodles, a calculator, converter, memos, to-do list, world clock, and a stopwatch. The converter was particularly handy with seven different types of conversion, including currency, weight, and temperature.
You also get a handy document and PDF viewer, although it didn’t appear to support images in the documents and my test PDF file was displayed in greyscale. The included games consisted of the ‘Tomsons & Touch’ games collection found on other touch-sensitive LG devices, plus ‘Pipe Game’, ‘Flying Dices’, and ‘Wheel Mania’. None of these games really held my interest for long, but could be handy for short moments of boredom. Unfortunately, the Cookie only has a tiny 48 MB of internal storage, so it’s pretty much essential to purchase a microSD card to expand the device’s storage for all your photos, videos, music, and documents. Up to 16GB microSD cards are supported.
User Interface
The LG Cookie’s user interface is very simple and nicely styled. There are some nice transition effects between screens that make the interface look modern and polished. The menu system is very intuitive and separated across four themed tabs: ‘Communicate’, ‘Entertainment’, ‘Utilities’, and ‘Settings’. Within these tabs everything is where you’d likely expect to find it, and even technophobes would struggle to get lost in such simple menus. As you’d expect from a touchscreen device, lists can be navigated by swiping up and down on the screen. This is lucky, as the scroll bars on the Cookie were very difficult to use, even after re-calibrating the screen twice.
There are two home screens that can be switched between by swiping across the display with a finger. One screen houses the Cookie’s widgets and the other houses the earlier-mentioned contact shortcuts. There are seven widgets in total, comprising of: an analogue clock, a pair of digital world clocks, a calendar, a memo pad, a photo frame that links to the gallery, a music player control, and an FM radio control.
The widgets can be moved into place from a menu that is brought up from a tab at the side of the screen. They can be positioned pretty much anywhere on the screen, but if you shake the device with the widget menu still open, all widgets get auto-aligned into a more tidy arrangement. This function is also present in the other home screen, to help align the contact shortcuts. I found it to be very handy, and a wonderful use of the Cookie’s in-built accelerometer.
There was no evidence of theme support on the LG Cookie, although it is at least possible to change the home screen background image. The Cookie also allows users to customize the main menu between tabbed and scrolling versions, change the menu and dialling fonts, and adjust the display brightness and backlight timeout.
Being such a screen-oriented control system, the Cookie’s UI makes use of very few dedicated buttons. However, you can always rely on the End button to take you back to the home screen, and the favorite/running apps button to bring up the favorite/running apps menu. The favorite/running apps menu is basically a customizable shortcut menu to favorite applications, with an accompanying tab to show running applications. From this menu the user’s favorite apps can be launched and any currently running apps can be closed. The camera shutter button can also be long-pressed to launch the camera application from the home screen.
The only real problem that I had with the Cookie’s software is that it wasn’t very stable. The device repeatedly turned itself off for no apparent reason, and regularly froze or blacked-out. The only remedy for this was to remove the battery and re-start the device, as it wouldn’t respond to any input - not even from the on/off button. At the time of this writing many users seem happy with the reliability of their handsets, but equally there are numerous other reports that support my findings. Therefore, it’s probably best to keep your receipt, just in case.
Conclusion
The LG KP500 Cookie is a great device for those who want the appeal of an iPhone for a fraction of the cost. The user interface has attractive effects and touch-sensitive gestures, and there is a wide variety of multimedia on-board to keep users entertained. It’s also easy to use and has a certain playful feel to it.
It’s not all good, however, and using the device could become very frustrating as the cost-cutting measures shone through the initial touchscreen luster. The Cookie could be very slow to respond at times, and seemed to lack the power of more expensive rivals. This often made messaging, email, and web browsing a bit of a chore, as the device struggled to keep up with my inputs. Then there’s the lack of 3G(INFO) and (unsurprisingly) WiFi, which leave the Cookie crawling through websites at lowly GPRS/EDGE speeds.
It’s also a shame that the Cookie doesn’t feature a 3.5mm headphone socket, as it would otherwise make a pretty good music phone. Thankfully, the camera was better than expected, and the gallery was quite nice, even if it was a little fiddly at times. So, if you’re a casual user and are looking for a more affordable alternative to the iPhone, the LG Cookie could definitely be worth a look. On the other hand, those in search of a hardcore multimedia device need not apply, and the same goes for hardcore SMS and email fans.
Overall, I give the LG Cookie a “Recommended” rating, as it provides plenty of simple functionality in a stylish and affordable touchscreen package. It misses out on our top rating due to the lack of 3G and its slow operating speed, though this shouldn’t worry the majority of people that opt to take a bite of the Cookie.
