LG Cookie Fresh review

The LG Cookie Fresh (LG GS290) phone, which is the follow up to the extremely popular LG Cookie series device, is a truly budget priced device. The device is offered at a modest price of Rs. 6,199 in India.

We analyse whether a touchscreen phone at this price really meets the expectations of the users when there are so many devices within similar price range competing against each other – or, it simply lacks certain basic features to keep the prices down.

The Cookie Fresh comes with a 3 inch screen that is simply large enough on paper for serious multimedia activities like web browsing, but the ultimate high point for this trendy touchscreen device is the presence of onboard Facebook and Twitter clients, which will help you stay in touch with everyone at the tap of a screen.

The device presents LG's LiveSquare system – and it is a bit of an oddity, to be honest. In fact, the device offers three main screens. When you flick between these screens using horizontal finger sweeps, you will find that one of these screens is dedicated to LiveSquare.

LG Cookie Fresh lets you create little animated avatars onto this screen, each one representing a contact. With this feature, you can see alerts from people and text or email them quickly. Users also have the option of customising the avatars, but you may find it pretty remedial and you will only appreciate or enjoy this feature if you happen to be in or around 13 years age group.

Then there is another home screen that is offered for speed dials, which again serves a similar purpose to the LiveSquare screen, minus all the animated nonsense.

The third home screen presents you with shortcuts to the following, FM radio controls, Facebook, weather, photos and more, which can be opened up along the bottom of the screen. You can also populate this home screen with widgets. Nevertheless, the range isn't vast and limiting them to just one home screen felt a little constricted to us.

Also, you don't have the option to download more widgets to the handset. Surprisingly, you may find no Twitter widget. To access it, you need to use the Social Networking app under the Communications section of the main apps menu. Here, you will find a MySpace connection as well as Twitter and Facebook links.

You can customise the wallpapers on each home screen separately, which is quite ordinary. LG's latest Cookie offfering is a budget phone in totality. The device packs the plastic build materials, which don't feel fragile in the hand altogether, but the higher end quality is simply missing out there.

For accessing main apps menu, you don't need a hardware button as it is placed under each of the three home screens in a strip which also includes shortcuts to messaging, contacts and the dialler.

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