LG InTouch Max GW620 review

This year looks to be the year Android properly takes off. The reason? Google's mobile OS is finally beginning to creep into low-cost, mass-market handsets. No longer does owning a full-blown smartphone cost a fortune to run and buy, and there's no better example of this than the LG InTouch Max. It's free on an eminently affordable £20 per month contract, and that includes unlimited internet access.

We'd expect to see cutbacks at a price like that, and it's obvious to see where LG has trimmed the budget. The 3in touchscreen is only resistive, meaning you have to apply physical pressure to activate onscreen buttons and links.

There's not much storage included as standard, with just 150MB internal and a 1GB Micro SD card included in the box. It occasionally feels underpowered – if you don't download a task manager from the Android Market it will eventually slow to a painful crawl.

Other than that, the GW620 is a remarkably capable phone, and a nicely engineered one at that. It boasts a slide-out keyboard with five rows instead of the usual four, and typing out text messages and emails on it is a pleasure. It feels well made too, the sliding mechanism popping out with a good, solid snap.

The good news continues with a display boasting a resolution of 320 x 480 – one step better than the similarly priced HTC Tattoo at 240 x 320 – an FM tuner, and all the toys you'd expect from a modern smartphone. The LG GW620 includes GPS, a digital compass, HSDPA, Bluetooth, and a perfectly acceptable 5-megapixel digital camera with LED flash. The GW620 will only shoot video at 320 x 240, though.

Battery life is good. The phone's 1,500mAh lithium polymer battery had 60% remaining on its capacity gauge after our 24-hour set test – that's better than the iPhone 3GS can manage, and on a par with the excellent T-Mobile Pulse. And browsing performance is perfectly acceptable, loading the BBC homepage over Wi-Fi in an average time of 15 seconds, and scoring 92 in the Acid3 test.

There are weaknesses, one of which is the phone runs the older Android 1.5, which LG says it has no plans to upgrade. That means owners will never have access to niceties such as voice search and operation, support for multiple Gmail accounts and Google Navigation (should it ever officially arrive in the UK). We don't like the two large touch sensitive buttons on the front below the screen either – it's far too easy to brush back or home by accident, thus dumping you out of what you're doing.

But we reckon potential purchasers will be willing to overlook the odd foible in a smartphone this cheap, capable and otherwise well-constructed. It makes us wonder why LG took so long to produce an Android phone in the first place.

Author: Jonathan Bray