Stunning screen
This handset's key feature is its fantastic 102mm (4-inch) capacitive touchscreen. Like the phone itself, the display is tall and narrow. In fact, it's got a 21:9 aspect ratio, so it can show a full cinematic image without having to crop the edges, as the iPhone or HTC hero do. When working in landscape mode, this means the screen is considerably wider than it is tall. That turns out to be both a blessing and curse.
It's a blessing for a number of reasons. Firstly, the extra width means you can view movies in their natural 21:9 aspect ratio, with the result that they look absolutely brilliant, especially as the display is very bright and has a reasonably high resolution of 800x345 pixels. The extra width has also allowed LG to introduce a neat split-screen view in the messaging applications: contacts are listed on the left-hand side, with messages appearing on the right, just like with standard PC applications. It also means Web pages fit across the screen without you having to scroll back and forth, as you must with pretty much every other smart phone around.
The downsides are that, as the display is also very narrow, when you do view Web pages in landscape mode, the rendered text is very small and quite difficult to read. Consequently, you usually find yourself having to zoom in to increase the text size to a more acceptable level. This defeats the purpose of having the wider screen, as, once you zoom in, you then have to scroll back and forth, just as you do on other devices. Also, when you call up the landscape keyboard in the browser, email or SMS applications, it practically fills the entire screen, leaving just a couple of lines of text at the top. We can't help but feel that LG would have been better off making the screen slightly taller in landscape mode, even if this would have meant using a non-21:9 aspect ratio.
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