LG's KP500 Cookie has probably done more to introduce newcomers to the touch-screen phone than any other handset. Even the manufacturer must have been surprised by the success of the Cookie – the 'affordable touch-screen' has sold over seven million to date.

LG is surely hoping for similar success with the LG POP GD510. It is aimed at the same market as the Cookie, and is billed as the 'world's smallest touch-screen'.

 

Style and handling for LG POP GD510

The LG POP GD510 may be the world's smallest touch-screen phone, but it is also one of the lightest, at a featherweight 87g. The metallic coated plastic cover stops it feeling fragile, though – we get the impression that it could withstand a couple of knocks.

The danger of a small phone is making it too fiddly to operate, but LG has used what space there is to maximum advantage. The three-inch WQVGA screen takes up the whole of the front, with just one hard key in the bottom right corner. This key has one function: to take you back to one of your three home screens.

The first home screen is a shortcuts page for you to fill up with your favourite widgets. Just drag and drop the widgets onto the screen then give the phone a shake to organise them in a grid.

Another of the home screens houses your speed dial list. You can personalise them with photos and get instant access to email and text from the contact.

On the third home screen sits the LG LiveSquare page. LiveSquare contains your most recently used contacts, each represented by a “human” or “animal” avatar. Press any of these, and the contact icons at the bottom of the screen tremble, encouraging you to choose to call or message your contact or update their details. It's a neat little feature, but considering that there's already a speed dial home screen on the POP, it seems an odd inclusion.

 

Web browsing for LG POP GD510

The accelerometers on the LG POP are super responsive, so you can see the many menu options on one screen when you hold the phone horizontally, as well as view web pages in their optimal format. It's good to be able to view a whole web page in one go, but we still found that we had to zoom in and out to read the page. It's a patchy process – using the touch-screen, we often found that we were zooming in when we wanted to zoom out, and vice versa.

The POP doesn't have 3G connectivity. The slower EDGE data speeds are okay, although it took some time to catch up when we were scrolling the pages.

An integrated social networking shortcut will take you to Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, but they won't run in the background like they do with other handsets. One nice touch is that when you're in Facebook, you can take and upload pictures directly to the site. The three-megapixel camera, though, could be better: there's no flash, and the zoom function only works when you reduce the pixels down to VGA.

 

Verdict for LG POP GD510

Building on the success of the LG Cookie, the POP GD510 is a nice-looking handset with quite a lot going for it. It's not a high-end phone so is lacking in features and connectivity, which may deter early adopters, but for anyone after an attractive handset at an equally attractive price, the POP should fit the bill.