LG GD550 Pure review, Price, pictures, Details, model specifications
Introduction
Big buttons and no questions asked. Believe it or not, that’s what some people still look for in a phone. The LG GD550 Pure is playing it safe – less tech inside means fewer things to go wrong. This is less a gadget for those who think old-school is cool and more for those who take old-school to mean safe and familiar.
The LG GD550 Pure is not many things but one. A good old-fashioned slider with the right measure of metal on the outside and a great keypad. It likes to keep it short and simple. Not too many fancy acronyms on the spec sheet and a user interface that prides itself on simplicity. We can’t even call it user friendly – foolproof is more like it.
Key features:
- Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support, UMTS with 3.6 Mbps HSDPA
- 2.4″ 262K-color QVGA display
- 5 megapixel autofocus camera, D1 video recording @ 30fps
- Standard microUSB port
- Bluetooth (with A2DP)
- Hot-swap microSD card slot (up to 16 GB)
- FM radio
- Excellent keypad
- Office document viewer
Main disadvantages:
- Very basic user interface with no homescreen
- No smart dialing
- Poor image quality and video recording
- Laggy image gallery
- No sign of any social networking integration
- Memory card slot under the battery cover
We usually like it when a company is trying to do things differently. And we don’t mind an occasional blast from the past. The 3G speeds and imaging aside, the LG GD550 Pure would’ve made perfect sense in 2006. In fact, this phone is easier to define by what it’s not than what it is.
The LG GD-lineup has all sorts of phones – from basic touchscreen (GD 510 Pop) through the cool Mini to the extravagant Crystal. These are all gadgets that the potential GD550 Pure user will never bother to look at. The GD550 Pure is a far cry too from the BL20 New Chocolate and the Pure is very much a low key version of LG’s sweetly-named handset.
There’s nothing like the PURE UI
So, we’ve come to the interface – or the lack thereof. We’re not being sarcastic here. The LG GD550 Pure won’t leave you scratching your head in wonder. It’s all right in front of you and the D-pad will get you where you want to go in no time.
The LG GD550 Pure is the first and so far only device to feature the PURE UI. The name fits the job perfectly. It’s straightforward and easy to work with – you don’t even need to read the manual. It’s very fast and responsive too.
So, how simple can it be? Well to begin with, the thing doesn’t even have a homescreen. So, what? If the iPhone can do without a homescreen, why wouldn’t the LG GD550 Pure?
It’s a slider and the form factor gets involved with the navigation. Slide up and you get straight to the menu. Slide down and the lockscreen kicks in.
A phonebook full of faces
The phonebook in the LG GD550 Pure can store up to 1000 entries. You can opt to display the numbers on SIM, in phone memory or both simultaneously. You can order the contacts by first or last name.
Contacts are either displayed as a list or as pictures. In the pictures layout, you get something quite reminiscent of the Cover Flow interface, only everything is much smaller. Below the contact images you can see the details of the selected contact.
Great messaging
The LG GD550 Pure can handle all of the most common type of messages: SMS, EMS, MMS and email.
We aren’t really the biggest fans of the handset’s messaging department but we still believe it’s capable enough for most occasions.
The first three message types share a common editor. All you need to do to switch between them is insert some multimedia content – like a photo or audio track for example. The editor itself has rather basic looks and that’s one thing we weren’t particularly fond of.
A basic image gallery
The gallery of the GD550 Pure is accessible either using the dedicated Media album located on the Camera pane or through the My stuff icon found in the Applications submenu. It offers one view mode: thumbnail with 9 thumbs on screen. Be aware that heavily populated folders take their toll: the gallery refreshes its thumbs every time it’s launched.
You can view single pictures in both landscape and portrait. To see further detail, zoom in. Zoom in/out and panning speeds are remarkable for a device in that class.
There is a let down, though. The slow browsing speed inside the gallery is quite a pain. Loading the next image always seems to take forever.
A nice music player
The music player on the GD550 Pure is almost the same as in the LG BL20 New Chocolate. It sorts tracks by three different filters – artist, album and genre. You can also create your own playlist if you like. There are no visualization options; however on the plus side, if the song you play has album art then it will be displayed.
The music player can be minimized. In this case the information on the current track is displayed on the lockscreen. Unfortunately, there is no way to control the player when it’s minimized. You can only mute it using the profile switch.
Poor video player
Typical for a midrange feature phone, the video player is not much to write home about. Varied codec support is non-existent and you can play only 3gp and some mp4 files at low bitrate. There are only a few options here – landscape, delete or send file. You can jump back and forth in the video timeline though.
Decent audio quaity
LG did a good job with the GD550 audio quality. The handset has very decent (although rather quiet audio output), with its only weak point being its high intermodulation distortion and sub-par stereo-crosstalk.
The rest of the readings in our audio quality test were pretty good to excellent. Given the abscence of a 3.5mm audio jack you couldn’t really expect miracles from the Pure but if you aren’t very demanding the handset will do the job for you.
Disappointing 5 megapixel camera
The LG Pure boasts a 5 megapixel auto-focus camera with no lens protection or LED flash though we’ve seen a pre-production sample of GD550 that has a LED flash but we’re not sure whether it would get to mass production.
The camera user interface is the same thing we saw in the BL20 New Chocolate and uses the same black and white color scheme. The available features are even fewer than those in the BL20.
The camera itself has no special features on offer other than auto-focus. In the user configurable settings are some effects, light sensitivity up to ISO 800, burst mode, white balance, brightness and timer.
The viewfinder layout is simple: a column on the bottom where you can toggle between the still camera and video recorder, set brightness options, go to the media album or toggle landscape and full screen view. All the other stuff is packed in the settings.
You can use the confirm button of the touchpad as a shutter key too, but if you do there’s no way to recompose the shot after locking focus.
Video recording
The LG GD550 is capable of capturing D1 (720 x 480 pixels) videos @ 30fps, which sounds great on paper but in reality things are quite different. Videos lack detail and there are visible compression artifacts.
Again you should record videos holding the phone in an upright, portrait position as this is the way the camera sensor is oriented.
Here goes a sample video clip.
Web browser is fine
The web browser on the LG Pure is basic, but reasonably good. It renders most of the web pages very well, but the smallish screen and lack of Flash support make it really just an extra, not something you can seriously surf on.
The web browser of the GD550 has a virtual mouse pointer that jumps between links. In most cases the mouse pointer moves rather logically and does the job right.
To zoom in or out, use the star and hash buttons.
