LG Viewty Snap GM360 review

Here we go again with yet another touchscreen phone from LG. The LG Viewty Snap is targeted at the younger generation with decent features. However the phone offers neither 3G nor Wi-Fi to the users.

Although, the absence of GPS is probably going to be a little bit easier to swallow, but frankly we find some of the user interface decisions a bit, well, bizarre. Ok, let's be clear. We aren’t sure about LiveSquare.

We'll get to that later. But there is a 5 megapixel camera with something fancy called Optic-all zoom, which we will explain shortly, and a good enough range of touch-friendly features to be going on with.

The handset looks and feels good too. It is smallish to hold at 108mm x 53.1mm x 11.95mm and its mostly black exterior benefits from chrome highlights which give it a visual appearance that punches somewhat above it real weight.

Inside that frame there nestles a 3-inch screen. A very familiar looking three buttons sit beneath the screen. Two are Call and End buttons, one is an extremely clever button which brings up favourite apps shortcuts. You get to the main apps menu screen via an on screen tappable icon, and there are also icons for calls, messaging and people.

There are three main screens and their functions are somewhat regimented. There’s a widgets screen which can hold four of the things, arranged against a selection of different wallpapers.

There’s a contacts screen where you can put shortcuts to your favourite people and again you can choose a different wallpaper. And finally there’s the LiveSquare screen – yes, you can choose a different wallpaper for that too.

Now, we don’t really get on with LiveSquare. It lets you set individual contacts up with their own little animated avatar. The avatars indicate incoming calls and messages, and you tap at an avatar to get more info and contact people back.

Even if we were about fourteen years old we don’t really think this would appeal greatly. It just seems more likely to appeal to pre-teens than teens.

The LG Viewty Snap sports a resistive touch screen and it has a reasonable resolution of 240 x 400 pixels. It is sharp and bright enough. We found it to be a bit less responsive than some others we’ve used and while this was mostly not a problem we did have some trouble entering text.

The screen's finger-responsiveness was only partly to blame here. Also culpable is the small overall size of the on screen keyboards.

You get a lot of text entry options, though.

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