LG GD900 Crystal

Posted on 06. Jun, 2009 by IBM in Previews.

If a phone can get away with looking like a dummy phone, it’s art. Let’s see. You wouldn’t want to touch the LG Crystal. At least a couple of minutes you’ll just sit back and admire. OK, you’ll eventually start exploring it and the question will slowly emerge.

What kind of keyboard do you put on a full-touch phone? Well the answer is simple – a touchpad. The LG Crystal keypad is not a real keypad, but a transparent touchpad instead. And it’s not there as a typing commodity, it’s there for the coolness of it. How sick is that you may ask? Well, we don’t really know but we’re infected.

We are previewing a pre-production unit here but it’s the most final design that LG currently have and happily matches the latest official photos, so the exterior will most likely stay the same in the final retail version.

If you’ve followed the Crystal as closely as we have, you will know that back in the day when it was first displayed to the public it had a strikingly different blue front panel gradient that later on silently disappeared. We guess them focus groups are more fond of uniform gray than gradient blue.

LG Crystal at a glance:

General: GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz, UMTS 900/2100 (alternative version: 850/2100) MHz, GPRS/EDGE class 12, HSDPA 7.2 Mbps
Form factor: Touchscreen slider
Dimensions: 105 x 52.5 x 13.5 mm, 127 g
Display: 3-inch 16M color TFT touchscreen, 480 x 800 pixels
Memory: 1.5GB integrated memory, hot-swappable microSD card slot (up to 16GB)
UI: LG S-Class Touch UI
Camera: 8 megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash and D1 video recording at 30 fps, QVGA time-lapse and slow-mo video recording
Connectivity: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP, standard microUSB port
Misc: Accelerometer for screen auto rotate, proximity sensor for screen auto turn-off, FM radio with RDS, DivX/XviD video support, TV-out, touch-sensitive keypad, gesture shortcuts, multi-touch input, office document viewer
Battery: 1000 mAh battery

Final words

There you have it folks – the LG GD900 Crystal surely is a handset that cannot go unnoticed. The see-through keypad is a true novelty and deserves much credit. The fact that its practicality is barely up to scratch is hardly worth mentioning as long as looks are so impressive.

Kudos to LG R&D for thinking out of the box and stylishly denying our claim that there isn’t much room for creativity in full-touch devices. We are also pretty glad that they chose such a well equipped phone for a base. The LG Crystal is a really attractive product with excellent value.

There’s no GPS on board, but the scarce GPS navio software options and the variable success rate we had with those on the LG Arena and Viewty Smart makes us think that it’s not a great loss. After all, Wi-Fi is there and for mission-critical applications, you can always get an external Bluetooth GPS receiver.

So from where we stand, the GD900 Crystal is a great step forward and now all it needs to succeed is to keep up the initial pace. A nice camera and a better job of those nice gesture shortcuts are topping our wish list, while the S-Class UI is just fine the way it is.