We recently received the LG GW520 phone for review. The GW520 has a 2.8 inch touchscreen along with a full QWERTY slide out keyboard making it ideal for social networking and messaging. A number of modern phones have virtual keyboards that work well, but for some people they just cannot get to grips with on on-screen keyboard and hence, prefer the physical keyboard instead.
Priced at £169.95 for a pay-as-you-go version the GW520 is at a good price for what you get. It’s not the cheapest of phones but at the same time, it’s not the most expensive, and sits in an affordable bracket.
The phone it’s self feels a little plastic in comparison to LG’s high end phones such as the LG BL40. Also the phone is slightly fatter than other LG phones due to the physical keyboard, however this doesn’t make it an oversized phone and it does sit quite well in your hands.
On the front of the phone you’ll find 3 buttons towards the bottom that are not embedded behind glass, but instead are covered in a flexible plastic. Due to the smaller screen there is a slight bezel around measuring a few mm down the sifes and just over 1cm top and bottom.
On the left side of the phone you’ll find up and down volume controls while on the right you’ll find a camera key, lock key and a microSD card slot.
The top of the device is home to the USB connector allowing you to charge, sync and connect headphones if needed.
On the back of the phone there is a 3.0 megapixel camera along side a loud speaker. Opening up the phone reveals a 950mAh battery that provides a good 4.5 hours of talk time along with an impressive 500 or so hours of stand-by time.
The phone runs LG’s propriety software (not S-Class) that works at an acceptable level. The screen is resistive rather than capacitive so requires a little bit more force to get it to respond but response seems to work well if you take that in to account.
A few new features have been added to the os over previous versions such as found in the LG Renoir. Widgets for Facebook and other sites can now be dragged on to the home page providing you with quick access to content from other sites. However, a lack of Wi-fi and often slow HSDPA access prevents these from working at a decent speed.
The keyboard is made of excellent quality and works very well. When sliding the keyboard out it feels solid. My only criticism of the keyboard is the very small spacebar key which for my liking should probably be a little wider, however it’s not a major flaw by any means.
Other features are what can be expected from a phone in this class such as MP3, video, text messaging, web browsing etc… Email is also supported on the phone which is a very handy feature. The LG GW520 can be configured for both MS Exchange and POP mail boxes although I probably wouldn’t expect those who are buying this phone to necessarily use Exchange support.
Overall it’s a nice phone that works well for this category. If you don’t want to be tied down to a contract and want a fairly decent PAYG phone for a good price then this could be the one for you.
On the downside the screen is quite small with a low resolution making it a little cramped. Also the build quality of the plastic looks like it could be damaged if dropped.
The phone is available on Orange contracts with details found here.
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