LG GD910 review: Tick-tock, tick-tock...

Flash UI disappoints with speed

The user interface of LG GD910 is based on Flash technology as past LG feature phone UIs and to tell you the thruth, it quite looks like them. It is of course stripped down to the bare minimum - there are only four icons remaining in its main menu, for instance. The design and organization however remain somewhat similar.

The GD910's UI

Of course, the novelty part is all about the watch homescreen. There is a number of different dials for you to pick from with some of them even capable of displaying two time zones at the same time. To toggle between the available dials, you simply flick up or down.

The available watchscreens

A sweep to the left or right toggles the available the standby screens. The first of them shows information about the battery status, current profile and signal strength.

A tap on the profiles icon brings out a popup with the available profiles (all three of them). The choice is between the normal silent or outdoor profiles but the number of available settings for each is comparable to those of the regular LG featurephones. The icon next to the profiles indicates if there is any missed event, while the third one triggers the flight mode.

The stand-by screen is a minimized version of the one found in LG's regular featurephones

Another sweep to the right displays the calendar for the current month. You can then press and hold the screen to enter the calendar app, without needing to go through the menu.

The calendar screen

The next screen is the main menu, which consists of the grand total of four icons arranged in a neat 2x2 grid. Those take you to contacts, messaging, utilities and settings sub-menus which appear as scrollable lists. There phone can be quite laggy when you go in and out the sub-menus, but perhaps the final version will have that fixed.

By default, the user interface comes in the black and white theme, resembling the one on the original LG Prada phone. There are also three alternative styles of the main menu which bring in more color and nicer icons.

The main menu only has four icons by default * you can change its style though

The final screen before returning again the watch dials is the video/voice call screen. It offers two shortcuts which allow you to initiate a video or voice call, bringing up the dial pad when one of them is selected.

Dialing numbers on the tiny screen can be a daunting task especially for men with large fingers. There is no Smart dialing, so you're left with the phonebook and its clumsy search interface to get in touch with your saved contacts.

The final screen takes care of making calls

A key feature of the watchphone are the voice commands that it supports. You just need to hold the Back key until the handset prompts you to say the command. There are prerecorded speaker-independent commands for dialing a number, opening the message composer, checking the time and so on. Those also work when a Bluetooth handsfree is paired with the device to maximize their usefulness.

The general performance of the UI of the GD910 is hardly spectacular. Sacrifices had to be made so an entire handset can be sticked in such a small body and snappiness is one of them. It's not so bad that it's useless but the lagging get irritating at times.

A petit phonebook, but capable enough

The Contacts list of LG GD910 offers much the same function as any ordinary phonebook but in a more miniature version. There is room for up to 1000 contacts in the handset's memory. The phonebook allows storing extensive information on you contacts. You can organize your contacts into caller groups, and you can also assign them a picture and a ringtone.

The GD910 phonebook can fit up to 1000 contacts

You can search a contact on the GD910 watchphone by gradual typing of the desired name but frankly said typing is not really our thing with this handset. We'd much rather use the scrolling instead, especially with shorter contact lists.

Searching by gradual typing isn't as easy as usual

Editing a contact gives you a pretty large number of (extremely hard to fill in) fields. We'd gladly suggest however that you synchronize the GD910 with a PC and transfer them that way instead.

Viewing and editing a contact

Still if you are really into it, you can complete the various fields such as mobiles, addresses, web-sites straight from the GD910 with the multitap onscreen keypad. If you fill in the birthday date the watchphone prompts you to add it to the calendar and does so automatically if permitted.