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LG GD900 Crystal camphone

See-through styling – a clear winner?

The 8Mp camera starts up in about four seconds after pressing the shutter button on the side. It offers maximum resolution of 3264 x 2448 pixels with autofocus and a 4x digital zoom which you can operate via the zoom buttons or by drawing a circle on the touchpad – another nice use of the keypad.

LG GD900 Crystal

Camera settings menu

Settings are accessed by a virtual wheel on the screen and include multi-shot (five), timer (up to ten seconds), image stabilisation and face tracking. It doesn't have the Viewty Smart's fancy Schneider Kreuznach lens, and leaves out some features such as Intelligent Shot mode, but it's capable of some okay pictures.

There's more purple fringing than we'd like to see on the images, and edges aren't necessarily as sharp as they should be, but colours are fairly well represented and video recording wasn't bad either at 720x480 pixels and 30 frames per second.

Viewing pics or videos in the gallery is a bit of a treat too. You can view thumbnails in portrait mode, or a sort of 3D slideshow in landscape. It supports MPEG4, H.263, H.264 and WMV as well as DivX and XVid video formats and our samples played well on the screen. You can blow them up to full screen size and while we had no trouble with our MP4 files, some WMV files wouldn't play properly.

For music it will play MP3, AAC, AAC+, e-AAC+, WMA and Ogg-Vorbis audio tracks and offers an equaliser with 22 non-adjustable presets, plus the option of Dolby Mobile, which does something to focus the sound, but also makes the audio a little more compressed. The FM radio is the same as the one we last saw on the Viewty Smart, which means a swish touch-sensitive onscreen tuning dial, automatic station search, 30 presets and RDS.

LG GD900 Crystal

Reasonable rather than remarkable camera with LED flash

Reception and sound quality were both pretty decent and the supplied headphones aren't bad, with their noise-dampening gromits and impressively deep if slightly uncontrolled bass. If you prefer you can use your own headphones as there's a 3.5mm adaptor, which plugs into the handset's micro USB slot. Alternatively, you can use a wireless pair, thanks to A2DP Bluetooth.

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