Anyone who's picked a food item from her local supermarket’s ‘budget’ range as opposed to the more pricey ‘branded’ equivalent will be well aware that you get what you pay for in this world.
When you crave the finest it’s almost inevitable that you’re going to have to flash the cash in order to achieve your dream.
It’s refreshing to discover that while this adage is usually watertight, it falls apart when you take the LG KP500 ‘Cookie’ into consideration. Retailing for less than £100 on Pay as You Go, this phone allows those of us on a budget to well and truly jump in to the touchscreen revolution.
Like its more expensive relative the LG Renoir, the Cookie sports a pleasingly large 3 inch screen, flanked by a small assortment of physical buttons. Pretty much every operation - from texting to scrolling through menus - is handled via this bold and colourful display.
At this price, the Cookie has to be the cheapest touchscreen phone on the market by a long chalk, and what’s all the more astonishing is that LG has made this technology available without compromising too heavily on the all-important feature list.
In fact, when placed alongside the Renoir, the Cookie showcases a more robust user interface (although this is admittedly down to the fact that it’s running an updated version of LG’s proprietary software) and an extendable stylus, which makes navigating the phone’s menu system a real joy.
It’s sometimes a little fiddly to remove when you’re out and about, but it’s far more accurate than using your chubby digit.
Before you rush out and slam down a hundred notes on this beauty, though, let’s find out what the catch is.
The Cookie lacks 3G, it has a weedy 3 megapixel camera (without auto focus or flash), there’s no wi-fi, and the internal memory is capped at just under 50MB (although naturally there’s the ubiquitous microSD card slot to make up for this).
The lack of these embellishments is a bit of a bummer, but when you consider the modest price it’s hard to grumble too enthusiastically.
LG is obviously aware that the captivating allure of the touchscreen will effectively sell this product to the masses and the company has wisely ensured that this facet of the experience is just as good as that seen on its vanguard handset, the Renoir.
Of course, this means that the Cookie is also lumbered with some of the less welcome traits of its bigger brother - for example, the pressure-sensitive ‘resistive’ screen isn’t anywhere near as pleasant to use as the ‘capacitive’ variant seen on Apple’s iPhone (which cleverly uses your body’s own electrical properties to register input), and the user interface is saddled with a considerable amount of latency (especially when moving from one menu to another).
When it comes to entertainment the Cookie is a modest success. Granted, DviX video playback is missing, as are the innovative recording options present in LG’s leading handsets, such as the Secret and the Renoir (so you’ll find no ‘Benny Hill’ style video tricks here, sadly) but the phone is brilliant for gaming.
When we reviewed the Renoir we were pleased with the high standard of the pre-loaded games, but expressed concern about how many new titles would be made available in the future.
While that reservation still holds true with the Cookie, it’s a much more attractive proposition for mobile gamers because it comes with more games to indulge in.
In addition to the accelerometer-enabled Wheel Mania and Flying Dices (which itself contains several different game types) there’s Pipe Game (a beautifully presented Pipe Mania clone that makes excellent use of touchscreen control) and the light-hearted mini-game collection Thomsons & Touch.
The latter is a complete hoot and seriously wouldn’t look out of place on Nintendo’s DS.
You may well be looking at the score at the bottom of the page and wondering why we’ve rated the Cookie higher than its more distinguished counterpart the Renoir; a puzzling move, you might argue, when you consider that it lacks so many cutting edge features.
The reason is simple – price. It’s astonishing that LG has the balls to introduce such technology and put it on the market for just shy of £100. While the Cookie is far from being the perfect device, it rightly deserves to sell like hot cakes.
Or should that be hot cookies?
LG KP500 Cookie
LG keeps its promise to bring truly affordable touchscreen technology to the masses; it may lack some vital mod cons but compared to similarly-price devices, the Cookie really does take the biscuit
Damien McFerran
Damien's mum hoped he would grow out of playing silly video games and gain respectable employment. Perhaps become a teacher or a scientist, that kind of thing. Needless to say she now weeps openly whenever anyone asks how her son's getting on these days.