LG GD550 Pure review: Slide and go

A basic image gallery

The gallery of the GD550 Pure is accessible either using the dedicated Media album located on the Camera pane or through the My stuff icon found in the Applications submenu. It offers one view mode: thumbnail with 9 thumbs on screen. Be aware that heavily populated folders take their toll: the gallery refreshes its thumbs every time it's launched.

You can view single pictures in both landscape and portrait. To see further detail, zoom in. Zoom in/out and panning speeds are remarkable for a device in that class.

There is a let down, though. The slow browsing speed inside the gallery is quite a pain. Loading the next image always seems to take forever.

The Media album

A nice music player

The music player on the GD550 Pure is almost the same as in the LG BL20 New Chocolate. It sorts tracks by three different filters - artist, album and genre. You can also create your own playlist if you like. There are no visualization options; however on the plus side, if the song you play has album art then it will be displayed.

The music player can be minimized. In this case the information on the current track is displayed on the lockscreen. Unfortunately, there is no way to control the player when it’s minimized. You can only mute it using the profile switch.

Music player interface

There are 5 equalizer presets on LG GD550 Pure. Sadly, none of them can be modified, nor new ones created.

Poor video player

Typical for a midrange feature phone, the video player is not much to write home about. Varied codec support is non-existent and you can play only 3gp and some mp4 files at low bitrate. There are only a few options here - landscape, delete or send file. You can jump back and forth in the video timeline though.

Video player interface

A simple FM radio onboard

The GD550 Pure has an FM radio with a fairly simple interface, but it’s generally very easy to work with. There is an auto scan feature that locates every radio station in your area and offers to save it. Unfortunately, RDS is not available.

The FM radio

Decent audio quality

LG did a good job with the GD550 audio quality. The handset has very decent (although rather quiet audio output), with its only weak point being its high intermodulation distortion and sub-par stereo-crosstalk.

The rest of the readings in our audio quality test were pretty good to excellent. Given the absence of a 3.5mm audio jack you couldn't really expect miracles from the Pure but if you aren't very demanding the handset will do the job for you.

Here are the results so you can see for yourselves.

Test	Frequency response	Noise level	Dynamic range	THD	IMD + Noise	Stereo crosstalk
LG GD550 Pure	+0.07, -0.64	-85.4	85.1	0.102	2.623	-66.2
Sony Ericsson Zylo	+0.02, -0.10	-85.5	85.5	0.0031	0.019	-84.8
Sony Ericsson Hazel	+0.03, -0.09	-87.3	87.1	0.0049	0.016	-86.8
Nokia 6700 slide	+0.07, -0.40	-90.0	90.0	0.0059	0.015	-90.9
Samsung M7500 Emporio Armani	+0.86, -6.28	-80.1	80.1	0.017	0.134	-73.9
Sony Ericsson W508	+7.30, -2.18	-85.9	84.7	0.0052	0.020	-84.7

LG GD550 Pure vs Sony Ericsson Zylo frequency response graphs

You can find more information about our audio quality test here.