LG Crystal GD900

Black, rectangular box with a screen and twelve buttons: we try to add a bit of pizzazz to the way we describe mobile phones, but this sums it up for so many phones. Not the LG Crystal.

LG on ice

While its form factor is familiar, we'd wager you've never seen anything like the Crystal before. As you can probably tell from the images, the LG Crystal is a slider with a transparent numberpad underneath, that glows softly when activated. This backplate actually features a gradated colour scheme, black at the top tapering to the see-through plastic at the bottom, similar to the gradient borders we're seeing on plasma TVs lately. With the slide down and the backlight on, the LG Crystal looks like a phone atop an ice sculpture of some sort.

When closed, the Crystal looks like other LG's from 2009, the Arena and the Viewty Smart. The 3-inch touchscreen is trimmed with attractive brushed metal, with three touch-sensitive soft-keys below the screen. On the back, under the slide, is an 8-megapixel camera with a flash, with a secondary camera on the front for 3G video calling. On the top left-hand side you'll find a micro USB charging port, which also doubles as the headphone socket. We hate not being able to plug in our favourite headphones, but LG thankfully includes an adapter in the box, which is a poorer alternative but better than nothing.

Onscreen you'll discover LG's new-ish S-Class interface. If you've missed it on LG's previous releases, it's a series of menus structured like a cube — four menus you move between with horizontal gestures on screen. Try as we may, we stil cannot get into S-Class, it seems like such a wasted opportunity. Shortcuts to contacts, music and videos all feel like the long way around the problem, and the widgets menu is the very definition of bloatware — 10 widgets and none of them are very useful.

I can see clearly now

Not only do we think the Crystal's clear keypad looks cool, it's also functional enough to pass our finely tuned gimmick-o-meter. Trust us, we looked at the keypad with the same suspicious raised-eyebrow that you at home are wearing as you read this. But after discovering the variety of intuitive uses LG has found for this pad we've been won over. On the home screen it works just like the touchscreen itself — horizontal gestures spin the menus and vertical gestures scroll down your lists of contacts and music. It gets cooler when you open the browser and use the entire clear area like a trackpad on a notebook, with multi-touch pinching gestures to zoom in on web pages. When typing messages you can use the illuminated keypad or revert to handwriting mode and scrawl your message on the pad one letter at a time. If you enter camera mode your gestures change to circular motions, zooming in and out and adjusting selected settings.

Each of these varied gestures makes sense given the various circumstances, and for the most part each works well. The multi-touch zooming and camera gestures are slow to react and hard to use accurately, but menu navigation is fine. Stealing an idea from Samsung's Preston, LG incorporates shape gestures to open pre-selected apps. This is set up in the multitasking menu, where you can choose from a set of shapes, a triangle or figure 8 perhaps, and allocate it to a task, like messaging or opening the browser. Once established you can use these gestures at any time, from any menu.

Shabby Shooter

Once we got past the excitement of the clear keypad, we soon found ourselves at a loss as to how to use the phone. Running on proprietary LG software, the Crystal is not a smartphone so installing apps isn't an option. To make matters worse, the rear-mounted 8-megapixel camera has to be about the worst camera phone we've used in ages, certainly the worst of the 8-megapixels we've seen.

We took photos under a variety of conditions, and even circumstances where camera phones tend to flourish — outdoors under natural light — showed the limitations of the camera immediately. After transferring the pics back to a PC we saw significant problems in the digital rendering of the images; noisy, grainy images with large amounts of haloing around the highlights. Even compressed to the size you'd typically upload to a blog, the pics still looked disappointing.

Performance

Thankfully, the Crystal redeems itself with excellent basic performance. Call quality was sharp and clear, and basic connectivity, like connections to Bluetooth headsets, worked with a minimum of fuss. Messaging is decent, though some may have to get used to using the touch-panel keypad. We found it took us a few days to stop trying to press the pad like buttons and just let our fingers glide over the surface, from button to button. Once we got the hang of it we found ourselves typing messages faster than we can usually achieve on touchscreen phones, and even with mechanical keypads.

Also good is the Crystal's battery life. LG include a 1000mAh battery pack with the phone which we found is good for at least two full days of basic use. This number would reduce with heavy use of web browsing or media playback.

Overall

The LG Crystal is a fairly typical offering from the Korean electronic firm, with design and usability at the fore and functionality sacrificed as a result. The Crystal certainly gets points for having a wow-factor, and it makes an excellent mobile phone, but we don't recommend it for people who will make the most of the extra features you will get on other phones. If you're likely to use the web a lot, or if you want your phone to also be an excellent media player, than the LG Crystal will fall short of your expectations.