LG GW620 review: Start-up package

Telephony

Now it’s time to talk about the fourth tab of the Contacts app, the Dialer.

The Dialer

The Dialer shows a virtual phone keypad that lets you dial a number, but it doesn’t support smart dialing. The Contacts tab is the better option if you’re dialing a contact from your phonebook.

As for the actual calls themselves, audio quality during a call is decent but it's a bit quiet even at maximum volume level.

We ran our traditional loudspeaker test and the LG GW620 fared well – it scored a Good mark, so you won’t have trouble hearing it beep.

Speakerphone test	Voice, dB	Pink noise/ Music, dB	Ringing phone, dB	Overall score
Apple iPhone 3G	66.1	62.1	71.7	Below Average
Nokia 5800 XpressMusic	75.7	66.5	68.5	Good
LG GW620	67.2	68.7	78.2	Good
Palm Pre	71.3	68.0	80.3	Very Good
LG GW520	77.1	74.8	82.7	Excellent
HTC Legend	78.0	74.3	79.7	Excellent

Messaging, how many email clients do you need?

The LG GW620 can handle all common types of messages with ease - SMS, MMS and email. Email support is excellent with support for Exchange out of the box and social media buffs will be pleased with the level of integration of that content as well.

Composing a message is a little frustrating as the text box only takes a single line of the screen, leaving you very little space to work with.

A press-and-hold on the text box gives you access to functions such as cut, copy and paste. You are free to paste the copied text into any other application like email, notes, chats, etc. and vice versa.

Sending Dee Dee a message

Gmail is one thing that you can't expect to have changed much compared to other Android handsets.

The Gmail app is simple to use but very functional

The extended Gmail features include batch operations, which allow multiple emails to be archived, labeled or deleted, spam report and of course conversation-style email view mode.

The standard Email app doesn’t do conversation style display of messages – it sticks with the folder structure. The Inbox folder shows the number of messages that have been retrieved and how many of them are unread.

The generic email app

There’s also a custom LG My Email application – it can handle several email accounts and is dead simple to set up. It also has handy shortcuts to email contacts and the calendar.

The My Email app from LG

Still, for Gmail, the Google-made app is the best and the generic email app that comes with Android does more than fine for other email services. So, My Email seems a little redundant.

My Email seems particularly unnecessary when you count in the Moxier suite of apps, which include Microsoft Exchange support for email. The Moxier Mail suite offers Direct Push synchronization with Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 and 2007 and supports synchronization of contacts, calendar and tasks. The suite is also available from the Android Market, but it will set you back 25 bucks, so good on LG for bundling it with the handset.

The only on-screen keyboard you get with the LG GW620 is a phone keypad. The hardware QWERTY keyboard will be handling all the workload here.

The virtual portrait keypad is the only on-screen option

Image gallery looks nice

The LG GW620 has a pretty attractive gallery. The 3D effects and smooth scrolling contribute to a pretty good user experience in general.

Those 3D effects are reserved for Android 2.0 devices only, but LG have somehow ported them to ver. 1.5.

The LG GW620 comes with a refreshed gallery

The usual shortcut that allows you to share your images over email, MMS, MySpace or Picasa is now updated to support the My Email and Moxier Mail apps.

Viewing a single photo

Unfortunately, sharing multiple photos at a time isn’t available and neither is sending images via Bluetooth.

The LG GW620 supports a couple of zooming methods – you can use the onscreen virtual controls or you can zoom straight to 100% with a simple double tap on the screen.

Overall, zooming and panning is fast enough.