The Korean mobile phone maker LG has recently unveiled its first Android smartphone – the LG InTouch Max GW620.  First announced in September and released in November last year, the new handset is now available from T-mobile offering a 2-year ₤20 a month contract with unlimited data and from Virgin Media for an 18-month  ₤22 a month contract with unlimited text and data.

It comes in a choice of body colors – black, gray and blue.  The new smartphones heralds LG’s first foray into the emerging platform of choice among the latest smartphones.  It still uses an older Android 1.5 “cupcake” but this shouldn’t hinder an upgrade path to the latest version.  This essentially brings to 4 out of the big 5’s of mobile phones up on the Android bandwagon with Nokia still taking its time to join.

Upscale Features at a Glance

The InTouch Max is housed in a full-QWERTY side slider body measuring 109 x 54.5 x 15.9mm and weighing a hefty 139 grams – something you’d rather put on a holsters than in you pocket.  There’s not much of a stand-out as its feature set is mostly a mix of the good and the mediocre we’ve basically come to expect from a decent smartphone.

Software-wise, it has pretenses to being a social networking smartphone like most other recent smartphones on the market.  You get instant access to SNS Facebook and Twitters accounts where updating is often made easy depending on how well your fingers type on a QWERTY keyboards at this size.

You get a decent MS office document viewer/editor as well as motion-sensitive games.  And talking about applications, it has access to around 20,000 online apps more than half of which are free for downloading.

This makes the Max a first in the LG mobile phone stable to make us of open source application which, as Sales and Marketing Director of LG, John Barton, admits, “signals the end of expensive and exclusive applications and the start of applications for everyone.”

Hardware-wise, the LG InTouch Max GW620 is a 3G phone with HSDPA at 7.2 Mbps and HSUPA for high speed internet access that enhances your surfing and social networking experience while on the road.  It’s also your basic quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE on 2G as well as a dual band UMTS on 3G.

There’s WiFi 802.11b/g, A-GPS and the usual Bluetooth 2.0 and microUSB 2,0 for local data connectivity.  If there’s anyone feature that can lay claim to being remarkable is its 5-megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash, image stabilization and face detection as well as WVGA video recording as a cinema-grade 30fps frame rate.  This puts the Max in the league of upscale camera phones in the market.

Its 3-inch QVGA resistive touchscreen display with 256k color support may be disappointing to some who are now getting used to large Wide-VGA displays and capacitive touchscreens following the iPhone example.

But that won’t be surprising when we consider the rather modest contract prices from either T-mobile or Virgin Media.  Internal memory is modest at 150 MB but you get up to 32 GB of microSD of external memory expandability.  Talk times are decent at 8 hours on 2G as well as 600 hours on its 1500 mAh lithium-polymer battery.