LG GD880 Mini review: Going minimalist

Multi-touch gallery

The LG GD880 Mini offers two gallery modes depending on the handset's orientation. In portrait mode images and videos are displayed in a grid sorted by date, type or name, while in landscape mode you get nice spatial view.

The image gallery grid and spatial view

The landscape 3D gallery has been changed yet again since the LG BL40 New Chocolate. While in the original S-class interface you only had three images visible at a time, the BL40 had a lot more with options to change the viewing angle and zoom level. The Mini now shows 5 pictures at a time within a virtual arc containing all the images in your handset.

There are no viewing options available or different arcs sorted by month. Performance-wise it's really ok - it's as fluid as it gets.

Thanks to the multi-touch enabled capacitive touchscreen, you can pinch-zoom on images but the zooming and panning are unfortunately very slow. The notable lag will disappoint most of the users.

The opened images also rotate automatically thanks to the built-in accelerometer.

Viewing an image • options

Apart from the standard options in the gallery such as rename, delete, print, send and info, there is also a slideshow mode. You can choose the time interval, the display order (shuffle or not) and the transition effect.

Sending options include Bluetooth, Email, Postcard or Message, while the only web upload option is to Blogger. It would have been nice if LG implemented some easy upload to Facebook or Twitter, but not this time obviously.

Nice music player

The music player has also been changed since the last time we saw it in the BL40 New Chocolate. It now has an independent “now playing” screen with a nice spinning vinyl for visualization (when album art is not available).

The music player • landscape view • equalizers

Turning the phone sideways takes you into landscape mode where you have all tracks in a iPhone-like cover flow. In both modes you have the usual music controls at the bottom of the screen.

Equalizer settings are also available. While most of them are pretty standard, you surely will notice the Dolby Mobile, so typical of LG.

Video player has full DivX/XviD support, works flawlessly

While the music player brings no functional changes, the video player is a big surprise. It now supports all kind of DivX and XviD videos up to WVGA resolution.

The video player

It played all the DivX/XviD videos we tried without breaking a sweat – no dropped frames or other issues. We even tried a full length movie and it ran excellently. Subtitles are not supported but anyway, well done LG!

Dolby Mobile is available in the video player too and is turned on by default. And just so you know, its potential is best appreciated on the headphones.

FM radio

The Mini comes with an FM radio that you can listen to both in the headphones and the loudspeaker. In either case you've got to have the headphones plugged in as they serve as an antenna.

The radio stores up to 50 stations and there is support for receiving two-line radio station info over RDS. Scrolling stations is very easy and intuitive - you have quick access via the two rows of buttons below the main window.

Much like the music player, when the FM radio is running in the background you can control it using the home screen widget.

The FM radio