The LG Viewty GT is another in the growing line of mid-range touchscreened phones which are becoming difficult to distinguish from each other. One point to note about this one at the outset is that it is available exclusively on Three in the UK.

The Viewty GT is a small format handset. It weighs 98g and measures 107 x 54.5 x 11.8mm. This makes it small for the hand and pocket, and it should be easy for most people to reach right across the screen for one-handed use.

However, the touchscreen measures 3.0 inches, and that is a little on the small side for media rich activities like Web browsing. Actually, the screen is a little small for many touch-based activities like entering text or just tapping at smaller icons.

The screen is resistive, which means you have to press a little harder than you would with a capacitive screen to get responses, but on the plus side there is a tiny stylus housed in the phone's chassis which you can use for the finer points of screen prodding.

There are just two home screens, a paltry number when compared to higher end smartphones, and even in mid-rangers we are used to seeing three home screens. One of the home screens is dedicated to favourite people; just three of them mind you, so you'll have to be ruthless. The other is a widgets screen, which you can populated by dragging widgets up from a bar along the bottom of the screen. It is a neat touch that you can shake the handset to get them to auto-arrange on screen.

The multitasking key that we've seen in other recent LG handsets is also here. It is a hard button under the screen. Press it and you get a list of favourite apps and also a list of running apps. It is really useful and it saves you calling up the full menu, which you do from a soft button that is ever present on the two home screens.

There are other ever present soft buttons too, for messaging, contacts and the dialing screen. These sit on a row along the bottom of each of the two home screens.

The 5-megapixel camera is quite a good one and has a macro mode, the ability to take three, six or nine continuous shots and the dubious ability to put a picture frame around any image as you shoot it.

There is 60MB of built in memory and a microSD card slot on the right edge so you can add more. As a budget handset the LG Viewty GT lacks Wi-Fi, which is unsurprising but a bit disappointing.

It is really irritating that the headset shares the microUSB connector used by the mains power and PC connection leads. This is really a very old fashioned setup and it makes it difficult to use your preferred headset in favour of that supplied by LG.

Verdict
The LG Viewty GT has a passable camera and it is a compact handset. Some will find the stylus a retro idea, but it does make it easier to work with this handset. Basic? Yes. But it is performs its tasks well enough.

Company: LG

Contact: 0800 358 8460

Tags: lg universal serial bus microsd touchscreen handset wi-fi android htc thunderbolt