The Cookie KP500 was a budget phone with a spec to match, but it has so far sold over one million in the UK – it’s the manufacturer’s best-selling touch-screen handset so far. The Cookie Fresh doesn’t change a winning formula, just tweak it a bit. So will LG see similar success?

Style and handling on the LG Cookie Fresh

The LG Cookie Fresh is a nice looking device – clean and smart with curved corners – but it doesn’t stand out. It’s slightly narrower than the original, but manages to fit in a three-inch resistive touch screen.

The gesture unlocking feature, which we’ve seen on previous LG devices, is great: assign icons to specific features and simply scribble the icon onto the screen when the phone is locks to go right to that feature. We went for an M for our messages, for example. The simpler you make it the easier using the gesture unlock will be.

You get three home screens. The first lets you add four of your favourite functions by attaching them to a rather cute virtual washing line. It’s a shame you’re limited to four, but then the large icons would crowd the small screen if you added more so it’s probably for the best. The second home screen houses LG LiveSquare, in which you can assign moving avatars to your contacts. You then view your messaging history with that contact, send group texts by highlighting the relevant avatars or set reminders. Cutely, the avatar representing you gets a little speech bubble on certain days, such as “TGIF” every Friday and “Merry Christmas” on Christmas Day (obviously). The third home screen is a simple way to assign your favourite contacts.

There are no accelerometers so you will have to change the orientation of the screen via the setting menu if you want to view it horizontally. Of course, you can just use it vertically, but the on-screen T9 keyboard is fiddly, while the QWERTY in landscape mode is far easier to use.

Internet on the LG Cookie Fresh

The lack of 3G on the original Cookie was a sticking point for us, and we were hoping this would have been added to the Cookie Fresh. However, this hasn’t happened, which makes web surfing frustrating. Scrolling down a page too quickly meant we often had to wait for the browser to catch up with us. You won’t want to use it for anything more than quickly browsing webpages.

Social networking is now de rigeur for mobile phones, and the Cookie Fresh offers you SNS, through which you can read feeds and status updates, post your own status updates and access mobile-optimised versions of Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.

The verdict on the LG Cookie Fresh

The LG Cookie Fresh has no outstanding features to recommend it but offers simplicity of use and some nice touches, like the icon washing line. It may not attract the tech-savvy, but we can see this being another success for LG.