In a nutshell: The LG Pop is a super-compact budget touchscreen phone. Despite its small size, it features a large touchscreen display with a fantastic fun user interface. The Pop delivers all the goods that you'd expect in this price range: a 3 megapixel camera, a media player, a stereo FM radio, a web browser, Bluetooth wireless connectivity and a memory card slot. Similar in many ways to the massive-selling Cookie, the Pop offers an updated user interface, a more compact design and an upmarket look.
Best buy: *Free* with free line rental from Dialaphone (Silver) or Dialaphone (Black); or £63.95 on PAYG from the Carphone Warehouse (Silver) or £79.95 from Dialaphone (Black, Pink or Silver) or £99.90 from Mobiles.co.uk.
Review: November 2009.
LG have taken the massively popular Cookie and turned it into the LG Pop, just in time for the Christmas market! But although the Pop is an enhanced version of the Cookie, it's actually even smaller, although cleverly LG have managed to keep the screen the same size. That's because the screen extends over almost the entire front face of the phone, giving it a sleek almost frameless appearance. It's definitely a nice looking handset. LG are keen to tell us that the Pop is the world's smallest 3 inch touchscreen phone. But perhaps its more useful to say that the Pop has a larger touchscreen than its rival the Samsung Genio Touch, but is significantly more compact in all directions. And the benefits of a large touchscreen display are immediately obvious as soon as you start to use the Pop. As we're fond of saying, when it comes to touchscreens, size really does matter! The extra high resolution and the large physical size of the screen make pressing virtual buttons a lot more fun. Turn the screen on its side for a full QWERTY keyboard, making texting so easy.
The Pop comes with some cool widgets that sit at the bottom of the home screen and allow one touch access to applications such as messaging, web browsing, etc. There are three home pages giving quick access to contacts, multimedia, etc and making the Pop a really fun phone to use. The contacts screen is particularly cool, showing who last contacted you and how they did it. We'd say that the Pop is one of the easiest to use phones around, but with plenty of customisation and fun features to stop people getting bored with it.
The multimedia features of the Pop are similar to other entry-level touchscreen phones. The camera is pretty respectable, with 3 megapixels and video recording too. There's a movie studio app and a slideshow app for viewing photos and video. The music player handles virtually any digital music format and there's also a stereo FM radio built in. The web browser is excellent, although as the Pop lacks 3G, web pages don't load as fast as we might have liked. If you get bored there are plenty of apps supplied, including a surprisingly addictive snakes and ladders game.
Whilst the Pop doesn't have 3G, it is a quadband GSM phone, so you should be able to take it anywhere in the world with you. In terms of connectivity, it has Bluetooth and USB, which is everything that you'd expect from a phone priced at under £100.
The Pop may not have added a lot more functionality compared with the Cookie, but it matches the capabilities of other entry-level touchscreen phones, and it does it in style with a beautiful large display, a super compact body, and a fantastic user interface. We would have awarded the Pop 5 stars, but our recent experiences with LG phones lead us to suspect that the firmware in the Cookie may not be 100% robust. For this reason alone (call it a hunch) we've decided to rate the Pop at 4 stars. Read the user reviews below for real-world experiences of the Pop, and see how reliable the Pop turns out to be. The Pop is good value on PAYG (selling at under £100 at launch) and even better value on contract, with freebies such as free line rental, an Xbox Elite or a Nintendo Wii on offer.
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Features of the LG Pop include:
* 3 megapixel camera with digital zoom
* Video recording
* Touch sensitive screen: TFT LCD, 262k colours, 240 x 400 pixels (3 inches)
* Handwriting recognition
* Music player (MP3/AAC/AAC+/AAC++/WMA formats)
* FM radio
* Speakerphone
* Messaging: SMS, MMS, Email
* T9 predictive text
* Document viewer (TXT, PDF, DOC, PPT, XLS)
* Ringtones: 64 voice polyphonic ringtones / MP3 ringtones
* Wallpaper
* Java 2.0 games
* Phonebook (1000 names)
* Memory: 48 Mbytes plus microSD memory card slot (up to 8GB)
* Connectivity: USB 2.0, Bluetooth
* Internet: WAP 2.0, GPRS, EDGE, web browser
* Vibration alert
* Quad band
* Size: 98 x 50 x 11 mm
* Weight: 87g
* Talktime: 3.6 hours
* Battery standby: 360 hours
