LG GD900 Crystal

• Tweet

• Tweet

LG desperately to take over the place of Samsung to be second largest mobile phone manufacturer worldwide. Therefor the company has come out so many type of mobile phone covered from low-end basic phone to high-end smartphone. Despite the quantity, LG also keen to push the force in their creativity unit to designing more excellent phone to the world, and therefor recently the company has released the first transparent, touch sensitive keypad mobile phone – The LG GD900 Crystal.

Design

The LG GD900 gained a lot of people’s attention with it’s highly-unusual slide-out keypad, the transparent and Unique see-through alphanumeric touch-sensitive keypad. This touch-sensitive keypad is smooth and really responsive. It is certainly cool looking and unique, but also come with additional functionality (that will be covered later). Being a slider with dimension of 105 x 52.5 x 13.5 mm,it can still slip effortlessly in your pocket. The device also sports a 3-inch touch sensitive display that you can control all functions of the phone with it. The LG Crystal display still delivers decent image quality but it still performs quite poor when exposed to direct sunlight. Below the display, you will see the soft keys lied on it. Those keys include a shortcut to the cube interface and the two standard call handling keys – Call and End.  While the slider not open, the phone looks pretty ordinary touchscreen phone. And obviously, the transparent keypad is the only stunning thing in this device.

Crystal Touchpad

The keypad is more than just a facility for entering text and numbers and good looking.  The keypad has come with  registers gestures (unlike the screen) allows you to perform  as a shortcut facility (e.g. writing the letter M will load the music player), a handwriting input, a scroll-and-tap control, a two-finger zoom facility (when browsing the web) and many more. Noticed that those gestures are recognized only when they are made on the glass keyboard, on the screen they will not work.

Camera

The LG GD900 Crystal spot an 8MP camera with autofocus and flash capabilities. It boasts fancy Schneider-Kreuznach optics and able to capturing maximum image resolution of 3264 x 2448 pixels. The image quality of the LG GD900 Crystal was somewhat of a disappointment. It is not too bad but compare with other 8MP camera, this one is suck. Also the camera has the long response time, taking 7-8 seconds to complete a single shot. This is really a shame. The device still capable to capture video of up to D1 (720×480) resolution at 30 fps. The video recording quality, unlike that of the still camera, is pretty good. It has a relatively smooth movements and good response to lighting.

Music and Video

There is a music player which accessible both from the Cube user interface and the main menu. Like most the player,  you can sort tracks by artist, album, genre and rating. Also thanks to the built-in accelerometer, music player automatically switches its orientation from/to landscape mode when you rotate the phone.

The Crystal comes with an FM radio that you can listen to both via the headphones and the loudspeaker. It can store up to 30 stations and features a really likeable interface.  However, there is no audio recognition in this radio.

The video player in this device is support DivX and Xvid playback. To switch the video player to full screen mode you only need to rotate the phone to landscape position, thanks again to the built-in accelerometer. Besides the video player allows change the playing speed to 2x or 4x and to zoom in or out.

Final Words

The LG GD900 Crystal is not only an eye-catching handset but also is a feature-packed device. Despite the minor complaints, the LG GD900 Crystal is a very impressive effort.