LG GM730

Full Review

The LG GM730 is a new handset from the Korean smartphone manufacturer that runs on Windows Mobile 6.1. Although it’s not the most usable smartphone, it is definitely one of the better WinMo smartphones that I’ve come across.

Features

The GM730 uses a 528MHz Qualcomm processor that keeps things relatively workable. Connectivity options are well taken care of with support for both 3G and Wi-Fi and also GPS with A-GPS support. The GM730 has a 3 inch screen capable of displaying 65K colors at 240x400. It also gives you 289MB of internal storage expandable to 16GB using microSD. The phone has a 5MP camera (but no flash). Also, like in other WinMo phones, the GM730 has a full-featured mobile office suite with which you can create, edit and view Word documents and Excel spreadsheets; and view PowerPoint presentations and PDF documents.

Windows Mobile 6.1 doesn’t have the most touch friendly UI but the GM730 does try its best to alleviate that concern.

Design & Usability

The LG GM730 is a slim phone that looks quite elegant. The phone’s build quality is also not shoddy and it feels solid in the palm and slips perfectly into your pocket. The phone’s 3 inch screen is quite poor. First, it’s very dull; the brightness isn’t enough and even the colors look muted. Under sunlight too, the visibility remains poor.

The GM730 doesn’t have that many hardware buttons to speak of. There are two touch-sensitive buttons below the screen to receive and end calls and a central D-pad that can also be customized to act as an optical trackpad and buttons on the sides to control the volume and lock the phone.

Windows Mobile 6.1 doesn’t have the most touch friendly UI but the GM730 does try its best to alleviate that concern. The GM730 uses the WinMo OS customized with their proprietary S-Class Touch UI. Touch-based input is not the most sensitive especially keeping in mind WinMo’s small buttons. However, at no point of time did I feel that the UI was unusable (a thought that kept crossing my mind when I was reviewing the Acer beTouch E101). Plus, the GM730 allows you exhaustive customization options for your home screens which I found to be very helpful. Typing using the LG’s virtual keypad is an iffy affair. The alpha-numeric keypad is fine to use but when I shifted to the virtual QWERTY mode, typing wasn’t as good as I had hoped since I was regularly pressing keys I didn’t mean to.

Browsing on the GM730 was a fair experience and finger-based navigation was efficient. Call Quality both on the phone and using the hands-free was excellent and the voices coming over the speaker were clear without any static. I must make a special mention of its hands-free option which worked superbly and there was absolutely no distortion in the form of echoes or static. The phone’s battery life is also good and in spite of regular usage, the charge lasted for over a day.

Multimedia

Multimedia on the GM730 is a hit or miss affair. The 5MP camera performs disappointingly and its white balance seems off by a mile. Also, although noise in the images was minimal, they looked hazy at default settings. Low light images were predictably bad since the phone does not have a flash. The video recording also wasn’t anything special.

On the other hand, music playback was very good. The GM730 came with a set of regular earphones, which although not as good as high-end earphones, are perfect for casual listening. The same can be said of the GM730’s music player as it seemed very suited to all kinds of music. Looking at the way recent LG phones have performed, it looks like for music playback, LG phones are the ones to watch for.

Bottom Line

At first glance, the LG GM730 might look a phone aimed at business users (thanks to its fully featured productivity suite and very good hands-free option), its 5MP camera, excellent music playback and widget based interface make it a mainstream multimedia phone. However, its price-tag of Rs. 19,500 does not justify its performance and I am sure it would have scored much higher had that figure been shaved off by at least Rs. 4,000. Overall, the GM730 is a good product but one whose shortcomings keep it from excelling.