LG GW300 review: No-frills messaging

User interface: LiveSquare comm manager is nice

The GW300 has the latest Flash-based non-touch interface by LG. The interface features a lot of nice animations and transition effects. However, the best part of it is the LiveSquare, which we've already seen in a couple of touchscreen-equipped LG handsets.

The interface is generally quick and responsive enough. We experienced some serious lags a number of times; however, the culprit turned out to be our full 16GB memory card. Obviously, LG have noticed this as well and that's why they recommend up usage of card up to only 4GB.

The interface is alive with color: the LiveSquare

The LiveSquare homescreen is one of the few notable improvements over the previous versions of LG's feature phone user interface. The LiveSquare is in essence a log of all your recent communications. They are displayed on the screen in several different layouts. You can set the background as a Zoo or a Park, populated by small human or animal figures notifying you of missed events or received calls and messages.

The number of messages (or other events like incoming calls and emails) is displayed in a small bubble next to each figure. You even get such figures for events from contacts not in your phonebook.

You can also set the LiveSquare to reset every day so you'll see only today's communications. Using the grey button in the bottom left corner you can access a complete communication history.

The LiveSquare is a fun call log

The menu system is simple, yet decently organized and generally very usable. The main menu consists of a 3 x 4 grid of icons or a list depending on your preferences.

The menu system is simple yet convenient

The GW300 comes equipped with a task manager allowing you to run several Java and native applications simultaneously and effortlessly switch between them.

The task manager on the GW300 has a dedicated "launcher" knob on the keyboard placed next to the Call key.

The task manager

Phonebook is great

The phonebook capacity offered by the LG GW300 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 (including a character for the LiveSquare) and a ringtone.

The phonebook has decent functionality • editing a contact on the LG GW300

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 field of the same type becomes available.

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

If you don't want to go through all the contacts to reach those starting with "Z" for example, you use the search box at the top.

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

Telephony

The LG GW300 handles phone calls trouble-free, no voice quality or reception issues.There is Smart Dialing, and Speed dial is supported.

Dialing Dexter the smart way

However the Smart Dial is quite useless as it only searches for contacts whose numbers contain the digits you typed. That's not of much use since most people don't bother to remember the numbers of their contacts as long as they know their names.

The LG GW300 scored an Excellent mark in our loudspeaker performance test. More info on our test can be found here.