LG Crystal

LG are known for their original and creative phone ideas and the LG Crystal is another unique design. This is the first mobile to have a completely transparent keyboard. The phone, not being too dissimilar to the Samsung Tocco Ultra, consists of a touch screen user interface combined with a slide down keypad. The main difference from the Samsung though is that the crystal has a completely touch sensitive keypad as well. There are no separate keys with just a flat, see-through surface with numbers etched in.

The main display, as well as being touch screen has a very high resolution 800 x 480 pixels and 16 million colours as well as the actual size of the screen is quite impressive also being 3” diagonal. The features on this phone are also pretty cool such as the ability to draw a character on the screen to access your music, inbox, etc even if they are a slight bit gimmicky. But you can’t help but feel that with a price of up to £350 SIM-free LG could have given you something a little more special.

One problem that I have found after a couple of weeks of use is that when texting, you have the option of an on-screen QWERTY keyboard which is good and easily accessible but sometimes it locks up and you have to exit your text to unfreeze the phone.

Although the transparent keypad looks snazzy and is a great show off at the pub the original and cool design took all of 10 seconds for the novelty to wear off and for the £350 phone to slip into my pocket to be used just as I used my old, reasonably priced one.

To conclude, the new LG Crystal is a cool new design that could definitely be developed and the features are all quite neat concepts with a pretty good camera. The only drawback with this original mobile is the massive price tag associated with a phone that doesn’t quite give me all I wanted for the money I splashed out.

Battery – Standard battery, Li-Ion
Camera – 8 megapixel camera (3264×2448 pixels) with LED flash, autofocus and night mode, this mobile phone also has video and a secondary video-call camera

Data Features – GPRS Class 12 (4+1/3+2/2+3/1+4 slots, 32 – 48 kbps), EDGE Class 10 (236.8 kbps), Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, Bluetooth v2.0 with A2DP, USB and 3G (HSDPA, 7.2 Mbps)

Display – 3-inch TFT capacitive touchscreen (16-million colours/480 x 800 pixels) featuring S-Class Touch UI, Multi-touch input method, Accelerometer sensor for UI auto-rotate, Transparent touch-sensitive keypad, Gesture Shortcut and Handwriting recognition

Size and Weight – 105 x 52.5 x 13.4mm

Networks – 2G Network GSM 850/900/1800/1900 and 3G Network HSDPA 2100

Memory Features – Phonebook and photo-call memory, plus Call records at 40 dialled, 40 received, 40 missed calls, also comes with a microSD (TransFlash) card slot up to 16GB

Sound – Vibration alert, MP3 ringtones, Speakerphone, Downloadable polyphonic and Dolby Mobile

Other Features
• Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional OS
• SMS, EMS & MMS Messaging
• Email
• Instant Messaging
• Java MIDP 2.0
• TV-out
• HTML, WAP 2.0/xHTML Browser
• FM radio
• FM transmitter
• Games
• DivX, XviD, MPEG4 player
• MP3, AAC, AAC+, WMA player
• Document viewer (DOC, XLS, PPT, PDF)
• Voice memo
• Organizer
• Alarm
• Calendar
• Notepad
• Calculator
• Clock
• To-do
• T9