LG GD510 Pop

The three-characters-per-key keypad is small, but not so much so that it's inherently difficult to use. No, what makes texting and emailing difficult is that resistive touchscreen. Mis-hits were common, we found, until we became used to making slow, deliberate pushes, which upped our accuracy considerably. No doubt, with more time we'd get faster, but as it stands we have a real sense that that the screen lacks speed.

Minimalist: the USB connector does for charging, data transfer and earphone connection

Typists will be please to know that rotating the Pop triggers a screen flip that replaces the TXTing keypad with a Qwerty layout. The accelerometer can be quirky, sometimes flipping quickly, sometimes so slowly, you flip the phone back and then get the layout you wanted. So you rotate the phone back that way and wait for the inevitable return to portrait mode and then the shift to landscape.

When you have the Qwerty layout before you, it's an improvement on the SMS-oriented portrait-mode keypad and, provided you push the buttons with some deliberation, you can enter text fairly quickly. And we have to say, it wasn't hard to use two-handed. Even our blobby thumbs could key in email, URLs and so forth reasonably accurately on the wee keys.

LG has provided all of the apps you could want out of the box, and most work reasonably well. The music player has the usual equaliser and playlist features, and supports album art and ID3 tags. You can rate songs with up to five stars, but there's no gapless playback which, of the two features, is the one we'd rather have.

The Music app also handles video playback, but while it recognised our H.264 footage as an MPEG 4 file, it wouldn't play it. Only 3GP, thank you very much, so no movie watching on this boy.

The camera button doubles up to also trigger the Pop's Task Manager

LG bundles a pair of earphones that are hardwired into the microphone blob and terminate in a micro USB connector that slips into a hatch-covered port on the side of the Pop. There's no 3.5mm jack, or even a 2.5mm one.