LG certainly has a knack for bizarre names when it comes to mobile phones. We don't know why the KP500 is also called the Cookie, and can't begin to hazard a guess. But maybe that's not the point.

The Cookie is LG's attempt to bring a touchscreen mobile phone to the mass market. In that respect the Cookie is everywhere at fairly good prices on contract and for around £100 on Pay As You Go tariffs. If your operator of choice is Orange in the UK then you can choose a slight variant, the KP501, in either pink or silver and with slightly smaller front buttons than the original KP500 version.

Whatever option you choose, the Cookie is a neat little handset. At 106.5mm tall, 55.4mm wide, 11.9mm thick and just 89g in the hand it feels comfortable to hold and should not trouble most pockets.

The touchscreen measures 3-inches across diagonal corners and provides 240 x 400 clear, bright and sharp pixels. The usual touchscreen phone convention of three buttons beneath the screen is adhered to, with Call, End and a favourite applications shortcut doing the honours here.

The main screen can be populated with a range of different widgets which you drag onto it and off again from a side panel. If you want to dictate where the widgets will sit you can place them precisely on screen, or you can drag less rigidly and then shake the phone to get it to automatically choose an arrangement. The range of widgets includes a calendar, clock, image viewer and music player shortcut.

You can get to a screen of speed dials with a finger-sweep on the widgets screen, and tapping at the top of the main screen opens a status screen offering things like profile switcher and Bluetooth manager.

The Cookie benefits from a sensor that flips the screen as you turn the phone in your hand, and there are some on-board games that take advantage of it too.

The touch screen isn't always wonderful. In wide format you get a QWERTY keyboard for texting which is a little small for our liking. There is a stylus you can use with a fairly competent handwriting recognition system instead, but styli are really not what modern touchscreen users want to grapple with.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment, though, is that the Cookie is not a 3G handset. The large screen of this phone is ideal for Web browsing but doing this on a GPRS connection can be tedious.

The internal memory is a little small too, at just 48MB, though a microSD card slot lets you add more if you want to. The proprietary headset connector is somewhat annoying, while the 3-megapixel camera has a fair bit of shutter lag and its viewfinder is not full screen.

Verdict
The LG Cookie is a touchscreen mobile phone without a premium price tag. It looks good and has some clever features, but an average camera, lack of 3G and shortage of internal memory are among the let-downs.

Company: LG

Tags: lg qwerty mobile phone touchscreen microsd android pocket-lint business and economy