LG GM200 review

Indian mobile phone market is getting new range of music phones. The latest one to enter the scenario is LG GM200. The new LG phone promises a lot for the music lovers in India and it certainly boasts of new features for the young mobile users in this part of the world.

The first significant difference you will notice with this device is its sound system. The new LG GM200 comes equipped with Dolby sound system. The device offers excellent sound quality which is awsome and pretty loud at the same time.

We have reviewed quite a few music phones in the recent times, but certainly none of those devices matches the decibel level that the LG GM200 has to offer. It's a treat for music buffs as you may hardly find any distortion of sound quality at even full volume while playing music on this handset.

The latest entrant comes equipped with FM radio. It's another pleasant addition to this device and it may take a while for you to get adjusted to the FM radio features. But once you are familiar with it, you can easily store the available FM channels. Unlike other existing music phones with FM radio, this phone offers one-place channel finder. With this feature, you can store and locate all the popular FM channels at one place.

However, one thing that we found not up to the mark with this device was its radio reception quality. It is really poor. It's surprising though that LG has quite a few entry-level phones which perform better than this device on this field. Additionally, there's an option of recording songs from the radio. The radio packs ‘Antenna’ that allows you to switch on the radio either in the handsfree mode or with the earphones.

The LG GM200 offers pretty basic specs to the users. In fact, we can say it is quite average compared to the contemporary handsets available in the market. The device sports a 2.0-inch TFT LCD that offers a 176 x 220 pixel resolution (256k colors) and a large multi-language keypad with a five-way navigation keypad.

The music phone offers a standard 3.5mm earphone socket, a  2-megapixels camera and a 2.1-inch subwoofer. With the presence of the subwoofer, the users can enjoy channel audio feel in great details.

Another aspect that mars the device is its user interface. The LG GM200 comes with an extremely slow user interface. It's again surprsing that you may hardly come across any other device in the market, which incorporates UI as slow as this handset. Then texting or SMSing is again a big problem with this device. You may find it extremely difficult to key in characters while texting.

The battery power is somewhat better than the average phones. We were able to use the LG GM200 for nearly three days once charged completely. In fact, we tried lots of stuff on the device such as listening to music, video play, messaging and regular talk as well. Overall, the battery life was quite satisfactory.

Moving down the other features, you will come across a voice recorder with this handset. We tried this feature and found the reception quality of the microphone satisfactory. The recorded voice was crisp and audible without any glitches.

For connectivity, the device supports EDGE, GPRS, stereo Bluetooth, USB 2.0 and WAP features. You can enjoy Internet and download emails as the LG GM200 supports IMAP and POP accounts. However, given a chance I'd not like to access the Internet with this phone because of its slow UI.

Priced at Rs 8,500, its a standard phone but if music and sound ..err volume is what drives you, then LG GM200 is here for you.