Phones.com » Cell Phones » Review of the LG KP500 Cookie

It’s the iPhone age and almost every touchscreen phone looks more or less similar to it. The LG Cookie was no exception, but the surprise? It costs just around 200 dollars. No way the Cookie’s going to be a competitor to the iPhone, but it offers a decent experience. The Cookie weighs ‘just’ 89 grams, and is thin at 11.9 mm. It is indeed soft to the touch and provides the ‘feel’ of a costly smartphone. One nice thing about the LG Cookie is that it takes few smudges. There’s a metallic band splitting the entire phone’s casing into two. Apart from this the Cookie doesn’t have many design spcialities. One can do without the stylus provided, the LG Cookie can be operated entirely by finger-touch; thanks to its 3-inch resistive touchscreen. Below the screen are Call, End buttons and a Favourite App key.

The Cookie is not 3G capable; neither is it a smartphone with a popular platform. The Cookie is a limited phone with LG’s proprietary OS, but has been designed to please the feature-hungry masses. The phone has a full-featured music player and FM Radio with RDS. Video support was very limited due to hardware and platform limitations. MPEG4 playback wasn’t up to the mark. The Cookie has a shuttered 3.2 Megapixel camera with no Autofocus or Flash, rendering it useless for photo enthusiasts. Video recording was limited to QVGA at 12fps only in the 3GP format. One nice feature is the Office Viewer, letting users view Office or PDF documents. The PIM capabilities of the phone were up to the mark and LG included four games in the Cookie. The Cookie was slow in some applications like E-mail or the Web Browser. Messaging was a below-average experience and the Text entry system was somewhat flawed while handwriting recognition was noticeably slow. The user interface of the device was thoughtful and the LG Cookie had an accelerometer for automatic screen rotation. The screen was capable of displaying 240x400 pixels in 262K colors. The Cookie was hampered by firmware issues, however we hope these are what most normal users don’t come across.

The LG was a 2.5G device, but thankfully it works across the continents because it’s a Quadband GSM. EDGE Class 10 provides the Cookie with Data functionality; but that’s not high-speed for most users. There’s also no Wi-Fi; but that is expected for a sub-$200 phone. Fortunately the Cookie has the latest Bluetooth 2.1 support, you can pair devices without the hassle of passcodes. There’s A2DP support and you can pair your favorite Stereo headset wirelessly to the Cookie. PC connectivity is aided by USB 2.0.

Performance of the LG Cookie was below average. There wasn’t more than 3.5 hours of talk time and 2 weeks of standby. LG’s battery indicator was also flawed, the device often ‘jumped’ into a low battery state.

You can have some real fun by means of the LG Cookie, as it lives up to LG’s promise that it is one of the most affordable touchscreen feature phones ever. Give a try and simply check it.