LG Cookie Fresh GS290 Review

Introduction:

It seems LG is firmly intent to offer the wide audience a cram full box of cookies in an attempt to come up with a handset to repeat the smashing success of the LG Cookie KP500. Two new members of the famous family have been introduced by the time of the current review, the LG Cookie Plus GS500 and LG Cookie Fresh GS290 and we are waiting for the official announcement of another device, the Cookie Gig KM570. What they all have in common is they are affordable feature phones equipped with touch sensitive screens.

Today we are going to take a closer look at the LG Cookie Fresh GS290 that, at the time being, is the poorest family member in terms of hardware specifications. It seems what it stakes on to win over customers is audio playback functionality – the handset features 3.5mm headphone jack and allows its owners to listen to radio stations without necessarily having to plug in a headphone set. Similarly to most other handsets in the affordable segment of the market today, the Cookie Fresh lacks 3G and comes with mediocre, 2-megapixel camera.

Design:

For good or bad, the LG Cookie Fresh GS290 is the typical affordable touchscreen phone, in terms of design. Its appearance is by no means breathtaking, but it’s not bad either. LG plans to offer it in a plethora of color variations, trying to suit as many consumer tastes as possible.. The plastic, from which it is manufactured, feels fairly cheap, although not unpleasant to touch. It has smooth curves, which make the LG Cookie Fresh GS290 feel natural in the hand. We are somewhat annoyed at the battery cover that can be removed way too easily and it’s not unlikely that it falls off while you carry about the cell phone in your pocket.



You can compare the LG Cookie Fresh GS290 with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

The screen measures 3 inches and has a resolution of 240x400 pixels – standard for a budget touch phone. It guarantees a lot of pixelization, so that’s not the best-looking display ever. Still, looking through the preloaded pictures, we found it to be a worthy competitor to every other phone in the same class. As it is resistive, using it will be flawless for female users with longer nails, while the rest will have to put up with the inconveniences this technology provides. The screen utilizes resistive technology, meaning you will either have to press it with your fingernails and put up with the inadequate response or exert extra force to get things done.

All the keys on our prototype felt nice and we are happy to see the microSD slot is on the left side and allows for memory card hotswapping. The device is charged via its microUSB port that you also use to connect it to a desktop computer.



All in all, the LG Cookie Fresh GS290 is what you’d expect it to be – a bit cheap, not very attractive, but still pleasant enough to look at. The version in silver looks rather boring really, but other colors may provide a breath of fresh air to the handset design and make the device an appealing option, especially to kids and children, not to mention these groups are part of the target audience.

Interface and Functionality:

There are certain interface novelties that make the LG Cookie Fresh GS290 distinctively different from the Pop GD510. The widgets and home screen themes are illustrative examples, because you use them to assign active applications particular places to get visualized in. This certainly decreases the number of the latter, but in this way they blend seamlessly into the background picture, which is quite cool indeed.

The three, characteristic home screen pages are at your disposal yet again – one for widgets, one for favorite contacts, and one for Live Square – the strange interface that presents your correspondences as little beings who stay on a nice green lawn, trying to draw your attention towards them. We have never been really into it, but cannot deny it looks fresh and unique.


Generally speaking, LG’s feature phones equipped with touch sensitive screens are rarely snappy and most people have to put up with occasional lagging issues. The LG Cookie Fresh GS290 is among the less severely affected and the lagging gets more evident while scrolling the phone book. As a whole, the handset is sluggish alongside of the Samsung Corby S3650, although we cannot describe the operational speed as appalling really, rather, as slightly irksome. The cell phone also offers task manager.

By the way, we need to say a good word or two about the phone book. It allows for quite a few details per entry, plus you can search by both given and family names. The dialing screen enables you to search by entering digits (our “6-3-6 leads to Neo” example applies here). The LG Cookie Fresh GS290 is not equipped with an accelerometer, so you need to press a button to switch between portrait and landscape QWERTY keyboards. Still, we do like the fact that both layouts are available. The first is handier, since its buttons are larger. The landscape QWERTY features keys that are more easily pressed with your fingernails, although this doesn’t really warrants fast text entry.



The LG Cookie Fresh GS290 has neither 3G, nor Wi-Fi. The web browser however, is usable. Indeed, you can surf the internet and even enjoy complex sites like ours. Using EDGE, loading times for such big pages are VERY long, but once loaded, scrolling is smooth enough and zoom by double tapping is available. Still, the browser is not as good as the WebKit-based ones available with Samsung’s devices. You also get a dedicated Facebook application that is usable, but tends to get sluggish.




Camera and Multimedia:

The interface of the 2-megapixel camera has many different options, such as white balance, night mode, effects, timer and exposure. Video is captured at QVGA resolution and 10 frames per second. All told, the snapshot and video quality is acceptable for an affordable device, but if you consider them important, you better opt for a cell phone like the LG GT505 or Samsung S5560.




LG Cookie Fresh GS290 sample video at 320x240 pixels resolution

The music player lets you filter by various standard criteria and then allows you to do different basic stuff like rating a song, enabling shuffle and repeat. You also have the possibility of using a few equalizer presets and playlists. The loudspeaker is powerful enough and quite sharp, but not unpleasantly sharp though, but is not unpleasant; just don’t pump up the volume to its maximum setting. The experience when listening through earphones will vary significantly, depending on the earphones you use. We couldn’t test the earbuds from the box, but used a pair of ours and the sound was good enough. We hope the same will hold true for the ones from the package.


One of the things that we like best about the LG Cookie Fresh GS290 is that you are allowed to listen to radio without necessarily having to plug in a pair of earphones, plus the sound quality is surprisingly good, and the station you’ve tuned to gets recognized in a few short seconds. This is an extra feature that we do hope becomes more common throughout the cell phone world.

Performance:

One of the strengths of the LG Cookie Fresh GS290 is the pretty good in-call quality it delivers. Our callers sounded somewhat quiet, but their voices remained lively and discernible. People on the other end didn’t have any major complaints either, except for the several occasions when we used the phone while walking down a busy street.

The battery provides about 6 hrs of continuous talk time and keeps the device operational for 16 days in stand-by, which is a decent performance – worse than what the Samsung Corby S3650 offers, but certainly better than the LG Pop GD510.

Conclusion:

Back in 2009 Samsung made a relatively successful attempt to conquer the market of affordable handsets with touch-sensitive screens by introducing the Corby series (the Corby S3650, CorbyPRO B5310, Corby Plus B3410, Corby Pop C3510) and models like the Samsung Lindy M5650. It seems LG intends to strike back in 2010 and try to win over customers with the new Cookie members. The LG Cookie Fresh GS290 does have what it takes to weather the storm and make a stand against its rivals.

The prices in this market segment are almost equalized and given the design appeal of any handset is highly subjective (the Cookie Fresh GS290 is quite far from being unattractive), what manufacturers can compete in is offering more extras. The Cookie Fresh comes with cool features like good audio playback quality, headphone-free radio and gives you the opportunity to create your own videos using pictures. We find its interface more enjoyable than the software the Samsung Corby S3650 is based on, but we would have liked the device better if it was snappier. All told, the LG Cookie Fresh GS290 is a truly likeable handset and we believe it’s one of the best affordable cell phones with touch-sensitive screens on the market today. Still, if you need alternative options, consider the following handsets:

The Samsung Corby S3650 – it offers its owners the cool option to change the overall look of their devices via replaceable panels. The display utilizes capacitive technology, which makes it more enjoyable to use than the screen of the Cookie Fresh, plus the overall operational speed is higher.

The Samsung Lindy M5650 – the music-oriented sibling of the Corby that features similar design and a number of functions aimed at audiophiles (like dedicated application for access to last.fm). Its audio playback quality is better than what the Cookie Fresh delivers, but the M5650 lacks headphone-free radio.

The LG Pop GD510 – the world’s smallest cell phone with 3-inch screen that also comes with awesome design and much better camera than the Cookie Fresh. Sadly, it’s not equipped with 3.5mm jack.


The LG Cookie Fresh GS290 is a fair choice for people on the lookout for a decent and affordable handset and you can’t go wrong with it.