LG GD510 Pop review: Mobile pop culture

The usual phonebook

The phonebook capacity offered by the LG GD510 Pop is up to 1000 contacts, each with its full set of details. You can organize your contacts into caller groups, and you can also assign them a personal picture and a ringtone.

There is a bunch of available fields for each contact on your list - you start off with fourteen fields, but once you enter a number or an email address, an additional empty field of the same type becomes available.

You can also add a note to a contact and when you enter the birthday field, you can also have the phone save the date as a reminder to the calendar.

There is also an option to choose the contact's Livesquare icon so it can't be mistaken with somebody else.

The phonebook • Livesquare integration

Scrolling the contact list is fluid and friendly. In fact, LG have done a great job with scrolling throughout the user interface so it's almost as enjoyable as on the iPhone.

If you don't want to go through all the contacts to reach those starting with "Z" for example, you can either use the search box at the top or you can drag the side scrollbar, which seems the quicker option.

You can opt for displaying the SIM and phone contacts separately, as well as all together in a single list.

Telephony

The LG Pop handles phone calls trouble-free, no voice quality or reception issues.There is Smart Dialing, and Speed dialing is supported. When you hit a key, which has been assigned, you get hinted of the contact in question.

The onscreen dialing pad • Smart dial

As you may have noticed there is only one hardware button, which can accept or end calls. The only way to reject an incoming call is by using the on-screen slider.

While receiving a call, the single button below the display flashes in green until you accept it and then turns red to allow you to end the call. There is also an option to reject a call with an excuse text message.

When you're not taking a call, the contextual Home button opens the Call history. It's pretty standard - there are four tabs for full call history, dialed, received or missed calls.

The call log

There is Smart Dial functionality in the dialer pad but it's quite useless as it only searches for contacts whose numbers contain the digits you typed. This just isn't of much use since most people don't bother to remember the numbers of their contacts as long as they got their names.

The LG Pop scored an Excellent mark in our loudspeaker performance test. More info on our test can be found here.

Messaging department does the job

The LG GD510 Pop handles SMS, MMS, and email. Much like most other handsets by LG, SMS and MMS share the same editor.

For typing you can use either the multi-tap alphanumeric keypad, or you can rotate the Pop and go for the virtual landscape QWERTY keyboard. There is touch feedback either way, which certainly assists typing accuracy.

The Pop offers alphanumeric keypad, full QWERTY keyboard and handwriting recognition

However the QWERTY keyboard is not much of a treat as the 3" widescreen display simply isn't large enough to comfortably fit all those buttons. As a result, keys are rather small.

The Pop's QWERTY keyboard though, even though crammed, is accurate enough and altogether more friendly than the Cookie's. It seems LG put some effort in it and a stylus is not as badly needed as with the Cookie.

While we're at it - the LG Pop also has handwriting recognition if that's how you roll.

When it comes to emails, the LG Pop deals with them hassle-free. Setting up an email account is a breeze thanks to the clever setup. For a Gmail account for example, all we had to do was fill in the username and password fields - the account settings were retrieved automatically. Furthermore, we were prompted to select between POP and IMAP setup.

The email client is doing a great job

In case you have to setup your email account manually, there is a host of settings that you need to enter. Both POP3 and IMAP4 protocols are supported. You can set the handset to auto retrieve new mail at a preset interval with a dedicated setting for roaming. The email client supports SSL too.

The maximum attachment size for both incoming and outgoing mail is 1MB. Still, such limitations are a nuisance in a modern email client and we suspect they're imposed to save network carriers the traffic hassle.

Quite naturally, archive files such as ZIP or RAR are not among the supported file types for attachments, but still you can save those to the phone memory if you get them with an email. MS Office and PDF files can be opened and previewed directly in the email client.

Once you've downloaded your messages, you can use the search feature to find specific emails or you can sort them by various filters such as date, sender, priority, read/unread, subject, size, etc. There is also an option for marking multiple emails as "Read".