LG GW620 Review And Price
The LG GW620 and the Motorola Dext (known as the Cliq in the US) have a few things in common. The GW620 was released in September last year shortly after the announcement of the Dext. Both come with a landscape slideout QWERTY keyboard and run on Android 1.5 (more on this in the review). Most importantly, the GW620 and Dext are the companies' first Android smartphones.
Design
Don't judge us, but the gunmetal blue keyboard with horizontal grain design running on the sides was the only design style that caught our eyes on the GW620. The matte buttons on the five-row keyboard have a good size, smooth texture, excellent tactility and are one of the best implementations in a QWERTY that we've come across. The color contrast on the handset is refreshing and doesn't look tacky.
The sliding mechanism is very smooth and, once past the halfway mark, the built-in spring takes over. The screen snaps into the final position rather suddenly, but the entire sliding action is very fluid, if not a little loose.
Close, the GW620 loses part of its charm. The 3-inch touchscreen is flanked by a brushed metal section above and glossy black chin below. Around the back, the soft touch plastic completes the juxtaposition of materials used for the chassis. The main Home and Back controls are touch-sensitive, though we keep thinking that these are physical keys. Ironically, the Enter button, which can be pressed, was rarely used.
The top/bottom edges of the phone slope gently from the front to the back when the phone is facing the user. This results in a rather streamlined profile if you are looking at it from the side. LG has kept the GW620 relatively slim, so it doesn't feel bulky in the hands even with a slideout keyboard underneath the display. The build quality and overall finish are also sound.
Features
The GW620 runs on Android 1.5 with a half-baked LG software. When you switch to the LG interface, the default menu tray is replaced with a row of four icons. Instead of dragging the tab upward on the screen like you would on the standard Android platform, you tap on the dice icon on the right to get to the main menu. This is sorted into Communication, Multimedia, Utilities, Google and Downloads, relatively similar to the layout of the S-Class interface. You can drag-and-drop to rearrange the icons or add them to the home screens. It's functional, but there's nothing else to look forward to. The interface falls flat in the face of Motorola's Motoblur and HTC's Sense.
Moxier for synchronization with Microsoft Exchange 2003 is preinstalled. Setting it up is a breeze if you have the necessary information, such as the server address, username and password to connect to your office network. There are also standalone social-networking applications for Bebo, Facebook and Twitter. From the Contacts application, you can add Community profiles, i.e. Facebook and Twitter, for each person. This enables an integrated tabbed view of the person's updates on the social-networking sites directly from the contact list, but adding the profiles is hard work. We couldn't find any automated option to link the individual profiles.
There are also customizations to the gallery and camera applications. Pictures are laid out like a 3D wall with the tab for switching between various media cutting in at an angle. So when you scroll, the images appear to be flying in and out of the screen in landscape mode. The camera inherits the interface that's now familiar on LG devices. A slider switch lets you toggle between still and video shooting modes and settings are changed by cycling though an onscreen wheel.
Picture quality was a hit-and-miss as the autofocus was inconsistent. It wasn't noticeable on the phone, but when we looked at the snaps on the PC, nearly half the images we took weren't in focus. Fortunately, for those which were, the colors had nice saturation. Dynamic range was decent with the camera retaining details in the shadows.
read more “LG GW620 Review And Price”
Design
Don't judge us, but the gunmetal blue keyboard with horizontal grain design running on the sides was the only design style that caught our eyes on the GW620. The matte buttons on the five-row keyboard have a good size, smooth texture, excellent tactility and are one of the best implementations in a QWERTY that we've come across. The color contrast on the handset is refreshing and doesn't look tacky.
Close, the GW620 loses part of its charm. The 3-inch touchscreen is flanked by a brushed metal section above and glossy black chin below. Around the back, the soft touch plastic completes the juxtaposition of materials used for the chassis. The main Home and Back controls are touch-sensitive, though we keep thinking that these are physical keys. Ironically, the Enter button, which can be pressed, was rarely used.
The top/bottom edges of the phone slope gently from the front to the back when the phone is facing the user. This results in a rather streamlined profile if you are looking at it from the side. LG has kept the GW620 relatively slim, so it doesn't feel bulky in the hands even with a slideout keyboard underneath the display. The build quality and overall finish are also sound.
Features
The GW620 runs on Android 1.5 with a half-baked LG software. When you switch to the LG interface, the default menu tray is replaced with a row of four icons. Instead of dragging the tab upward on the screen like you would on the standard Android platform, you tap on the dice icon on the right to get to the main menu. This is sorted into Communication, Multimedia, Utilities, Google and Downloads, relatively similar to the layout of the S-Class interface. You can drag-and-drop to rearrange the icons or add them to the home screens. It's functional, but there's nothing else to look forward to. The interface falls flat in the face of Motorola's Motoblur and HTC's Sense.
Moxier for synchronization with Microsoft Exchange 2003 is preinstalled. Setting it up is a breeze if you have the necessary information, such as the server address, username and password to connect to your office network. There are also standalone social-networking applications for Bebo, Facebook and Twitter. From the Contacts application, you can add Community profiles, i.e. Facebook and Twitter, for each person. This enables an integrated tabbed view of the person's updates on the social-networking sites directly from the contact list, but adding the profiles is hard work. We couldn't find any automated option to link the individual profiles.
There are also customizations to the gallery and camera applications. Pictures are laid out like a 3D wall with the tab for switching between various media cutting in at an angle. So when you scroll, the images appear to be flying in and out of the screen in landscape mode. The camera inherits the interface that's now familiar on LG devices. A slider switch lets you toggle between still and video shooting modes and settings are changed by cycling though an onscreen wheel.
Picture quality was a hit-and-miss as the autofocus was inconsistent. It wasn't noticeable on the phone, but when we looked at the snaps on the PC, nearly half the images we took weren't in focus. Fortunately, for those which were, the colors had nice saturation. Dynamic range was decent with the camera retaining details in the shadows.
