Why You Can Trust CNET LG GW620 review: LG GW620
LG has again nailed the prepaid segment, this time with a full-featured Android smartphone at a budget price.
Design
The landscape slider has to be one of the most popular and practical handset form factors around at the moment, especially with texting teenagers. LG has already kicked a few goals with this sort of design over the last 12 months, with the LG WebSlider and LG Xenon both scoring well with our review team for bringing great value to the prepaid segment, but the GW620 takes this value proposition even further.
LG GW620
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
Landscape sliders often offer well-spaced QWERTY keyboards, and the GW620 is no exception. Though the keyboard is quite flat and the individual keys lack any significant definition, the size and spacing of the keys make this keyboard very easy to use. Unlike most mobile phone keyboards, the GW620 features five rows of keys, giving you a row of numeric keys rather than doubling up the numbers on top-row alphabet buttons. If you think about it this makes good sense, given that this is a phone after all and you're likely to dial a few numbers over the course of owning this handset.
Like the LG Xenon, the GW620 also features a touchscreen display, with this handset sporting a 3-inch HVGA resistive touch panel with capacitive touch buttons below the screen for navigating the menus. In our opinion, this screen is one of the weaker elements of this smartphone, as the resistive touchscreen lacks the sensitivity you may expect from a phone that relies on touchscreen input as much as the GW620 does. There are numerous elements of the user interface that require dragging or swiping screen gestures and these can be trickier to accomplish accurately on this display. The capacitive buttons on the other hand are almost too responsive. On numerous occasions we found ourselves exiting the menus or back-tracking through our web history because of accidental touches of these keys.
The GW620 charges via a micro USB port on the top left-hand side of the phone, and features a 3.5mm headphone jack at the top and a hot-swappable microSD card slot on the right-hand side. The screen lock key is also on the top of the handset, similar to other Android phones and the Apple iPhone.
Features
For many people the GW620 will be their introduction, not only to Google's Android operating system, but to owning a smartphone in general. A smartphone is becoming the device of choice for many upgrading their phone contracts, and Google's system will offer you a range of services that were difficult to use or absent on other phone systems. Out of the box, the GW620 is preloaded with a suite of Google services including GMail, Google Maps, Google Calendar, GTalk and YouTube, plus the Android Market for downloading your choice of the 50,000 apps now available in the store.
To give you the best access to these services, the GW620 is fit out with top-shelf smartphone connectivity features; HSDPA and Wi-Fi for web access, GPS for mapping software and Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP for connection to car kits and hands-free headphones.
Like all new phones, the GW620 is fitted out with a digital camera on the back of the handset, but unlike most phones in this price range, the GW620's 5-megapixel camera is actually quite good. With an LED flash and auto-focus, the camera here should cover most standard photo opportunities, and while the focus is slow and imperfect, the majority of pics we took turned out quite well, with rich black reproduction and nice, strong colours.
For a camera in an AU$300 phone the GW620's does a decent job.
(Credit: CBSi)
LG has opted to use the stock Android music and video players, which are fine for playing back your tunes and flicks, but won't win fashion shows for style. LG adds DivX video file recognition to the usually limited range of supported video codecs and include a 2GB microSD memory card pre-installed.
Performance
As you can tell from the features listed above, the GW620 punches above its AU$300 price tag in most respects; however, processing performance is not one of these areas. It's hard to tell whether the lag we've experienced is due to an underpowered processor or due to the older version of the Android platform the GW620 is running (version 1.5 to be precise), so owners of this phone will need a little patience when moving between apps.
Battery life during our tests was reasonably impressive though, we managed about 10 to 12 hours of continuous music playback at full volume, and typically about two days of battery life with regular use of the browser and phone functions.
Overall
Though it's easy to spot a few clunky elements, it's hard to deny what the GW620 offers to the Australian smartphone market. An Android smartphone with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard for under-AU$300 is fantastic value, especially when this phone also offers the same range of connectivity options we tend to only see on phones at twice the price.
Smartphone newcomers should also consider that a phone like the GW620 is likely to use more internet data than your old phone, so make sure you ask about data plans when you're signing up for a plan.