The new LG KP500 Cookie is a surprisingly powerful midrange phone with touchscreen, good camera and nice web browsing experience.
Overview:
LG KP500 Cookie has a good quality touchscreen, flash based and very friendly user interface and quite surprising specifications for its price range. The LG KP500 Cookie has a good music player and in fact it is the most compact touchscreen mobile phone available on the market at the moment. The phone comes in four different colors so you have a lot to choose from.
LG KP500 Cookie pros:
+ Quad-band GSM support
+ 3 megapixel fixed focus camera
+ Multi-tasking with a real task manager
+ Office document viewer
+ 3″ 256K-color TFT touchscreen (240 x 400 pixels)
+ Excellent touch optimized image gallery
+ Handwriting recognition
+ Simple, yet stylish design
LG KP500 Cookie cons:
- No 3G support
- No Wi-Fi
- Video recording isn’t good at QVGA@12fps
- Camera has no flash
- No standard 3.5mm audio jack
The design:
LG KP500 Cookie measures 106.5 x 55.4 x 11.9 mm and weighs merely 89 grams. It is made of plastic with rubberized back for easier grip. The front of the phone is dominated by the 3” touchscreen and looks much like the LG KC910 Renoir. Above the display you will the only the LG logo and the earpiece. The right side of the LG KP500 Cookie houses microSD memory card slot, the screen lock key and the shutter key. On the left side of the phone you will find the universal connectivity port, the lanyard eyelet and the volume rocker. While the top of the LG KP500 Cookie is completely bare, you will find the mouthpiece and the stylus compartment at the bottom. The rubbery back of LG KP500 Cookie houses the camera lens, but no flash so you can forget about taking photos in dim places and at night.
Performance:
LG KP500 Cookie has a 900 mAh battery and the manufacturer claims it should suffice for more or less 350 hours of standby and about 3 hours and 30 minutes of talking. The 3” screen is bright and vivid and actually it is LG uses the same 3-inch WQVGA display in many of its recent phones like LG KF900 Prada, LG KC910 Renoir. You get plenty of settings of the feedback the phone gives when you use the touchscreen, so you can opt for vibration or some kind of tone.
Messaging is quite pleasant on the LG KP500 Cookie. The SMS and MMS messages share an editor and in many instances setting up an email client is as easy as providing your username and password. The maximum attachment size for both incoming and outgoing messages in only 1 MB. When you type the message you may use the landscape QWERTY keyboard (stylus is recommended then as the buttons are really small), or multi-tap alphanumeric keyboard.
The LG KP500 Cookie comes with a document view, so you can read Word, Excel and PDF documents right out of the box. Unfortunately, the LG KP500 Cookie does not work with PowerPoint files.
The music player is surprisingly good in the LG KP500 Cookie. The tracks can be sorted by artist, genre, album, or you can create your own playlists. The music payer comes with several different equalizer presets and it can run in the background. The LG KP500 Cookie has also radio with RDS and can store up to 50 stations.
The video player is nothing out of the ordinary. It cannot play DIVX clips, but has a nice feature which allows you to take screenshots from the clips.
Image quality:
LG KP500 Cookie is equipped with a 3 megapixel camera which can take photos in the maximum resolution of 2048 x 1563 pixels. Although it is a fixed focus camera and without flash the photos look really nice. The images are full of details, with accurate colors and low noise levels. The camera interface is very similar to what you can see on the LG KC910 Renoir.
Menus / ease of use:
The LG KP500 Cookie has a very straightforward menu structure and a pleasant, flash based user interface. Again the user interface used by LG KP500 Cookie is very similar to the one used by LG KC910 Renoir, but it is slightly improved. For example, in the LG KP500 Cookie you get two hoomescreens. At the bottom of the homescreen there is the Widgets tray. The LG KP500 Cookie has the same Widgets as the LG KF900 Prada. Due to the built-in accelerometer when you put the phone in landscape position the menus rotate as well. Rotation is quick, but no as smooth as on some other devices. You can, of course, run several Java application in the background.
The LG KP500 Cookie’s phonebook allows you to store up to 1000 contacts with multiple fields for information for each of them. You can organize contacts in groups, assign specific ringtone, or photo. You can scroll through you contact almost like on the Apple iPhone. You can choose to view only the contacts from your SIM card, the phone, or both simultaneously.
Selected LG KP500 Cookie features and specifications:
2G Network GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
Display Type TFT touchscreen, 256K colors
Size 240 x 400 pixels, 3.0 inches
- Flash UI
- Accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate
- Handwriting recognition
Ringtones Type Polyphonic (64 channels), MP3
Customization Composer, Download
Vibration Yes
Memory Phonebook 1000 entries, Photocall
Call records 40 dialed, 40 received, 40 missed calls
Card slot microSD (TransFlash), up to 16GB (verified), buy memory
- 48 MB internal memory
Data GPRS Class 10 (4+1/3+2 slots), 32 – 48 kbps
HSCSD No
EDGE Class 10, 236.8 kbps
3G No
WLAN No
Bluetooth Yes, v2.1 with A2DP
Infrared port No
USB Yes, v2.0
Features Messaging SMS, EMS, MMS, Email
Browser WAP 2.0/xHTML, HTML
Games 4 + downloadable, order now
Colors Black, Vandyke brown, Anodizing silver, Elegant gold, Pink (KP501)
Camera 3.15 MP, 2048×1536 pixels, video (QVGA@12fps)
- FM radio with RDS
- Java MIDP 2.0
- MP3/WMA/AAC player
- MPEG4/3gp video player
- Organiser
- Document viewer (DOC, XLS, PDF)
- Voice memo
- Built-in handsfree
- T9
Battery Standard battery, Li-Ion 900 mAh
Stand-by Up to 350 h
Talk time Up to 3 h 30 min
Other recently reviewed mobile phones:
Nokia N85, Samsung L700, Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1, Sony Ericsson G705, LG KC 910 Renoir, Nokia E63, Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, Samsung M7500 Emporio Armani, LG KS360, LG KF900 Prada.