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What makes this mobile a winner is the great screen which flicks into landscape format to make the most of its 480 pixels at useful moments. You can use widescreen for Web browsing, for example, and switching is a simple matter of tapping an icon. You can drag a finger to scroll around a webpage and user the Shortcut Dial wheel to zoom. When browsing photos, which are shown wide screen, you can scroll through a sequence dragging the screen and use the Shortcut Dial wheel to zoom too. This all works well enough, but it doesn't feel quite as smooth as the touchscreen on the standard-setting iPhone.

There is a front-facing camera for two-way video calling, and the main camera has a 3-megapixel lens with autofocus and a flash. LG has done better with 5-megapixel cameras, and the one here is passable but not wonderful.

The autofocus is a little slow to function and it did no always deliver spot on results. The coloured dish, for example, photographed indoors under household lighting is not as sharp as I would have liked. The same can be said for the hanging basket which has good colour reproduction but some fuzziness in the image itself. The chair's glaring whiteness causes problems for some cameraphones but here the highlights are more controlled than others, despite some heavy softening and a bluish tone.

There is a music player of good quality, and the headset, while proprietary at the phone end, is two-piece so you can use your own 3.5mm headphones if you prefer them. Other applications include an FM radio, messaging including mobile email, voice recorder, to do list, calculator, world clock, unit converter and stopwatch.

Verdict

Wi-Fi could have lifted this phone from being a good touch-screened handset to one that was very good, as the screen size lends itself to mobile web browsing. However, the camera could have been better, the Shortcut Dial has more potential than has been implemented, and in comparison to Apple's benchmark-setting iPhone the touchscreen is a bit sluggish.

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