LG Cookie Fresh GS290 Preview

Introduction:

As the original LG Cookie, the phone that foreshadowed the era of the budget touchscreen, proved to be quite a success, the manufacturer naturally seeks to keep this trend alive. The appearance of the LG Cookie Fresh GS290 is a proof of this. It is part of the newly-formed Cookie family. However, what place does it take among the rest of the family members is a tough question, as the Cookie Fresh takes some of the newer features found on the Cookie Plus, but sacrifices others that were initially found on the original. In short, it replaces the 3MP camera found on the first Cookie with a weaker 2MP one, and it lacks 3G, but sports a 3.5mm jack. So, in the final analysis, we can say the LG Cookie Fresh GS290 will be the handset of choice for those who enjoy listening to music while on the move, but would pay as little as possible.


Design:

For good or bad, the LG Cookie Fresh GS290 is the typical affordable touchscreen phone, in terms of design. Its appearance is by no means breathtaking, but it’s not bad either. LG plans to offer it in a plethora of color variations, trying to suit as many consumer tastes as possible.. The plastic, from which it is manufactured, feels fairly cheap, although not unpleasant to touch. It has smooth curves, which make the LG Cookie Fresh GS290 feel natural in the hand.



You can compare the LG Cookie Fresh GS290 with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

The screen measures 3 inches and has a resolution of 240x400 pixels – standard for a budget touch phone. It guarantees a lot of pixelization, so that’s not the best-looking display ever. Still, looking through the preloaded pictures, we found it to be a worthy competitor to every other phone in the same class. As it is resistive, using it will be flawless for female users with longer nails, while the rest will have to put up with the inconveniences this technology provides.

All the keys on our prototype felt nice and we are happy to see the microSD slot is on the left side and allows for memory card hotswapping. In addition to 3.5mm, the Cookie Fresh sports a standard microUSB port for PC connection and charging.




All in all, the LG Cookie Fresh GS290 is what you’d expect it to be – a bit cheap, not very attractive, but still pleasant enough to look at, hold and use, as it conforms to the standards an affordable touchscreen handset has to cover.

Interface and Functionality:

LG’s touch interface for feature phones is intact here on the LG Cookie Fresh GS290. Again, we have the three home screen pages: one for widgets, one for favorite contacts, and one for Live Square – the strange interface that presents your correspondences as little beings who stay on a nice green lawn, trying to draw your attention towards them. We have never been really into it, but cannot deny it looks fresh and unique.
Although our unit is a prototype, we cannot help but notice that the LG Cookie Fresh GS290 suffers from some lag (a feature of almost all LG phones with this interface). We sincerely hope that LG will work this out by the time the phone launches, since it can be found throughout the whole interface and kind of ruins the experience. If it misses the mark though, one of the best performing touchscreen handsets in the low end will remain the Samsung Corby.



Anyways, the Cookie Fresh is one of the slightly better LG phones  in this respect. One new thing is in the main menu. It no longer allows you to scroll each category separately, but all of them at a time.



The interface of the 2-megapixel camera has many different options, such as white balance, night mode, effects, timer and exposure. Video can be recorded in QVGA resolution, which means one should not expect great results in this department.




The music player lets you filter by various standard criteria and then allows you to do different basic stuff like rating a song, enabling shuffle and repeat. You also have the possibility of using a few equalizer presets and playlists. The loudspeaker is powerful enough and quite sharp, but not unpleasantly sharp though, at least when not set at maximum volume. The experience when listening through earphones will vary significantly, depending on the earphones you use. We couldn’t test the earbuds from the box, but used a pair of ours and the sound was good enough. We hope the same will hold true for the ones from the package.



The LG Cookie Fresh GS290 has neither 3G, nor Wi-Fi. The web browser however, is usable. Indeed, you can surf the internet and even enjoy complex sites like ours. Using EDGE, loading times for such big pages are very long, but once loaded, scrolling is smooth enough and zoom by double tapping is available.



Expectations:

The LG Cookie Fresh GS290 has what it takes to become a decent low-end touchscreen phone. There’s no question about that. Still, after the first Cookie was released, manufacturers were quick to offer many other handsets of this kind, creating a fierce competition in the market segment. This means users can always look elsewhere if the Cookie Fresh underperforms in some area they need. But there’s still some time for LG to deal with at least some of the kinks, so it’s still a bit early to say if the Cookie Fresh will manage to generate a good number of followers.

LG Cookie Fresh GS290 Video Preview: