Today’s handsets offer a number of variations on the QWERTY keyboard. Some slide out, some offer the full monty, including dedicated numeric keys, while others are small and compact, with each key offering a dual use. LG’s latest phone in the Town series offers the latter, which makes it something of a BlackBerry wannabe, albeit without the range of features.

First impressions

Thanks to its curved chassis, the LG C300 Town will fit in the palm of your hand quite comfortably. It’s on the broad side, because it has to accommodate the QWERTY keyboard, but will still easily slip into a pocket. The slightly raised keys enable the user to distinguish between them, which is useful for heavy texters to type at speed, though we did suffer with the occasional single key press being recognised as a double key press. Between the keyboard and display you’ll find four hard keys and the D-pad, sitting on a mirrored background. This may be handy as an impromptu mirror, but shows up grubby fingerprints all too easily.

Social networking

At the top of the Town’s home screen, you’ll see there are several shortcuts in a row. Here you’ll find the LG social networking services (SNS) hub, offering shortcuts to Twitter, MySpace and Facebook. They’re not hugely user-friendly when it comes to firing them up (like many of the LG C300 Town’s features), but once it’s up and running the user can post, tweet and view friends’ profiles as they would on a Mac or PC. It’s a shame that on the Facebook shortcut if you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you then have to take yourself right back to access the tabs at the top of the screen. Using a shortcut on the QWERTY keyboard, or pressing the D-pad left or right would have been an easier option.

Surfing is not speedy, thanks to the slow EDGE data speeds, but LG has provided some handy shortcuts that compensate a little. Each numeric key offers a different function – you can add a bookmark with ‘2’, show your browser history by hitting ‘8’, or find a specific piece of text using the ‘*’ key, for example. We weren’t keen on the way the mouse pointer jumped rather than moving smoothly but even this was better than the sluggish four-way navigation, which was so slow we were never quite sure that it had recognised our command. Email synching was simple – just enter your address and password. However, adding more accounts was not such a breeze – you’ll need to enter host names and IP addresses, which is rather inconvenient.

Get the picture

While there is no camera key as such, you can press down the D-pad, which will open up the camera reasonably quickly. But don’t rely on the camera for anything more than the odd picture. You’ll find you can’t zoom in and out, there’s no flash, and we were really disappointed with night-time and low-light photos. Plus storage is pretty measly at 15MB. If you want to keep photos, music or videos on the handset you’d be wise to add a microSD card.

The verdict

The original LG Town only got an average score, but unfortunately the C300 can’t even match that. While we don’t expect entry-level phones to be awash with features, the ones they do have should be up to scratch. While it has decent social networking services, the LG C300 Town suffers from a below-par camera, unsatisfactory browser navigation and applications that are sluggish to open up. There are far superior low-end devices to choose from.