LG GD900 Crystal camphone

The plastic battery cover is a sort of two-tone affair, black at the top, and clear at the bottom. With the slide recessed, the cover looks black against the battery, which can be clearly seen inside. Slide the phone apart and all becomes clear. This cover is the through plastic backdrop to the transparent keypad, which is glass, with a metal surround. Disconcertingly though, it feels a bit unbalanced when open, and much heavier at the top than at the hollow bottom.

The keypad also responds to gestures and can behave like a trackpad too

The 3in capacitive touch screen boasts 16 million colours, a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels and looks terrific. Not as terrific as the very new OLED screens can look in sunlight perhaps, but it'll stand with pretty much any other LCD we've seen. Both screen and keypad offer the same haptic feedback and, initially, vocal cues when you touch them. This carried on the watery theme with water drop sounds, but we soon switched them off for being too annoying.

It might sound like a gimmicky concept, but LG has at least been careful to make sure that the transparent keypad is, at least, functional. Bright sunlight causes some issues with legibility, however, the 'buttons' are well enough spaced that finding the correct keys isn't really an issue. General use aside, the keypad also offers a few neat tricks.

One of them is the 'Gesture Shortcuts'. This presents 12 shortcut moves that are assignable to nine different functions. To access them, you just draw the gesture figure on the key pad. So a triangle might bring up your contacts, a 'C' shape will take you back to the last screen, a circle will access games etc. it's a neat idea and works surprisingly well, recognising our scrawls unerringly each time we did them.

Handwriting recognition also comes off well on the touchpad, although you'll need to press an onscreen button to toggle between upper and lower case letters and numbers, which can slow you down.

Watery-themed icon menu in landscape mode

The onscreen keyboard is very decent too. In portrait mode it shows up as a T9-style keypad, but in landscape it goes full QWERTY. There's also an accelerometer on board which switches the resolution automatically when you tip the phone on its side. The keys are smallish, but haptic feedback and iPhone-style pop-ups mean mistakes are rare.