LG GD510 Pop Review | Specs | Price

LG GD510 POP

The Pop is just another midrange touchscreen. And this is by no means a guilty verdict. The LG Cookie used to be just another touchscreen too. Certainly not now - over 5 million units sold later. The Pop is perhaps setting its hopes high as well. Let's see if the classic unisex design the feature mix and the affordable price tag .

Verdict

Pros:	3 inch touchscreen display with 240 x 400 pixels, Music and video players
Cons:	No 3G support, no Wi-Fi Camera lacks autofocus and flash
Outline	The LG Pop seems a reasonable move given the generous return of investment.

LG GD510 POP Specs:-

2GNetwork---------->GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900

Available------------>Released 2009, October

Dimensions-------->97.8 x 49.5 x 11.2 mm

Weight-------------->87g
Display-------------->TFT resistive touchscreen, 256K colors

Size----------------->240 x 400 pixels, 3.0 inches

Internal------------->42 MB

Cardslot------------->microSD (TransFlash), up to 16GB,
WLAN-------------->No
Java---------------->Yes, MIDP 2.1

Camera------------->3.15 MP, 2048x1536 pixels

Secondary---------->No

Video--------------->Yes,
Bluetooth----------->Yes, v2.1 with A2DP
Infraredport-------->No
AudioJack---------->No
USB---------------->microUSB v2.0
Battery------------->Li-Ion 900 mAh (LGIP-550N)

Stand-by----------->Up to 430 h (2G) / Up to 430 h (3G)

Talktime----------->Up to 10 h (2G) / Up to 10 h (3G)

Price --------------->325 USD approx

15000 INR approx

LG GD510 POP Review

The LG GD510 is made from brushed aluminum and has only one button on the front, which can shine either green or red, functioning as a menu key and as a call/end call key. The new phone also has some sort of a solar panel on the back, although LG didn’t mention this in the press release.

The LG GD510 Pop is the first LG mid-range phone to offer a budget version of the LG S-Class touch interface that's usually reserved for high tier devices. Besides the S-class eye-candy, it also comes with the proprietary Livesquare homescreen plus a handful of social networking apps. In the core though is still the regular LG Cookie or LG Renoir interface. There's a livelier camera UI as well - a bit downgraded variety of the camera UI of LG Viewty Smart. So in terms of UI, the LG GD510 Pop offers an interesting mix of modern features and looks, while keeping a low profile so as not to interfere with the sales of its elders.

The interface response is generally fast, fluid and responsive enough, and it should satisfy most users. The resistive display is decently sensitive and reacts to the lightest touch. The interface features a lot of nice animations and transition effects. For example, when you get to the bottom of a scrolling list, the items don't just stop rolling, but bounce and throb to your sweeps with almost physical elasticity as on the iPhone.The first nice novelty that the LG GD510 Pop brings is the three alternating homescreen panes. The first is the Widget-enabled screen that allows you to arrange several mini applications as you please.A touch on the marker in the bottom right corner of the homescreen pulls out the Widget tray, which holds all of the currently unused widgets. You can choose the ones you want and drag them onto the screen or stash the ones you don't need back in the tray. The padlock pictogram at the bottom left lets you know when you can use the "shake to auto align" option.

Ever since the KF700, LG handsets come equipped with a task manager. The Pop makes no exception with the handy application allowing you to run several Java and native applications simultaneously and effortlessly switch between them.

The task manager on the Pop is pretty similar to the one found on the Renoir and the Cookie, having a "launcher" tab that hosts a number of configurable shortcuts to various applications. Unlike the Renoir, the GD510 only offers nine slots since the favorite apps list isn't scrollable

The multimedia performance of the LG Pop is a good match for the LG Cookie and Renoir, sometimes even faster. The internal memory of 50MB also equals the Cookie's. But withsupport for 16GB memory cards no one will actually care about the miserly 50MB of inbuilt storage.

File browsing is generally fast but when you have a memory card inserted, each time you open the file browser it needs to refresh the image thumbnails. Not much of a problem if you have a small picture gallery, but it could get annoying taking several seconds with a huge number of photos. But that's a common issue for all current LG handsets.

The LG GD510 Pop file manager includes separate factory-preset folders for different file content. However, unlike some previous generation LG handsets (and those include even some pretty expensive ones) it has no problem handling user-created folders and the files in them.

LG have vastly improved their image gallery with the latest generation of touchscreen phones and now it offers a really nice touch experience. Flipping through images feels natural and fluid and will please even discerning users.

You can check your photos straight in the file manager or you can start the dedicated gallery where larger thumbnails are available. Still, the viewer for single images is one and the same for both methods.

The LG GD510 Pop has a really nice music player and if you wonder what nice really means, we guess better than the Renoir pretty much says it all. The layout is intact and the looks aren't too different but some nice functionality has been added. In fact you will get the same updated music player in the LG Prada 2. Now, LG could've put the S-Class music player, but we are still happy with this one too.

There is a nice Album Art visualization and lots of equalizer presets, which LG touch phones (save for the S-Class line) used to not have up until the Cookie.

With the LG Pop music player you can filter tracks as with any other modern music player - by artist, album, genre, and recently played. User-created playlists are also an option. Naturally, the music player can run in the background. You can control the music straight on the home screen with the dedicated mini player widget.

Now that equalizers are available, you can opt for one of five presets or you can turn them off to enjoy the track's original sound. A rating system has also been added, which allows you to give a score of 1 to 5 stars to each track.

Now this is the one part where the modest Pop is no match for the Renoir. Due to the lack of DivX and XviD support, videos are less of treat compared to the cameraphone flagship of the house. There is also YouTube integration, offering direct video uploads.

The camera interface is a combination between S-Class and the old LG UI. Access to all the camera settings is via the left taskbar in the viewfinder. There you get virtual buttons for zooming, exposure, shooting mode (single/multiple), full screen/full image plus an advanced settings key. This left toolbar auto hides when not used and you need to tap on the screen to bring it back.

On the right hand-side of the screen is another bar with a virtual shutter key, that also slides up and down to switch between still camera and camcorder. Alongside are the exit and gallery buttons. This taskbar is fixed and actually not part of the viewfinder - that's the way to get around the difference between the wide aspect ratio of the screen and the standard 4:3 image sensor. If you don't like that you can opt for the full screen view, where a part of the image does get cropped but you see the center bit in more detail.

As far as video recording is concerned, the handset captures video in up to QVGA resolution at 15 fps. With enough cameraphones around shooting WVGA@30fps this is hardly a commendable achievement by today's standards.

Flipping the screen landscape is automatic thanks top the built-in accelerometer and it makes browsing even more enjoyable.

If all that is not enough, the browser can work with up to two separate tabs and it can save web pages to be viewed offline. You can also search web pages for specific text strings.

Much like on the recent LG touch phones, the web browser history is quite conveniently displayed as a line of webpage screenshots - you can flip through them and just pick the one you want to open again.

Unfortunately, desktop YouTube watching is a no-go, as the browser lacks full Flash support. You can however go for the streaming mobile version of YouTube at m.youtube.com.

The LG GD510 Pop also offers office document viewing courtesy of the built-in Picsel viewer. As we managed to confirm, the viewer supports DOC, XLS and PDF files. The phone couldn't handle PowerPoint files however.

Scrolling and zooming in documents is very fast and fluid, except on extremely close zoom levels. This seems to be the case with most LG handsets in fact but we don't think it's that important. No one actually needs to zoom in that close. Text searching is also available.

The LG Pop seems a reasonable move given the generous return of investment by the Cookie. We still think the Cookie is very hard to beat but the LG GD510 Pop may've taken the right approach. It's striving to repeat a huge success and uses the same concept but does well to distinguish itself. The Pop is just a bit more conservative - but equally appealing - and that may secure it more diverse demand.

It's true though that the LG Pop hardly outdoes the Cookie in terms of features save for a few little S-Class touches to its interface. Comparisons will be inevitable and the LG Pop may find it hard to motivate as many users. It seems 3G and WLAN are too much to ask in the kind of market the Pop is aiming at, but DivX support could've made a lot of sense for the target audience. LG chose to go green instead but it's not certain that the optional solar panel will make that much difference.

Anyway, we have to admit the Pop is facing a much harder task than the Cookie. And we're not talking pure sales. The Cookie was pretty much unchallenged in its day - free to take on the more or less empty niche of basic touchscreens. The Pop in turn has to strike a difficult balance. It could've easily been expected to match the Cookie track record if it offered a couple of upgrades but it would've stood right in the way of higher-ranked devices like the Arena.

LG GD510 POP Video

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