LG GS500 Cookie Plus deals & review

Succeeding a popular 17-month old LG KP500/501 Cookie is no mean feat but the LG GD500 Cookie Plus boasts of a feature set that not only updates the older Cookie feature phone but does justice to its highly regarded name.

It inherits much of the same touchscreen monoblock form but gets a more rounded demeanor for a softer look. But up close, it’s now a 3G phone with social networking personality and other enhancements to bring it up to speed as a phone for the 2010 crowd but without throwing away its reputation for practical affordability.

It even comes in a choice of colors while retaining the black framing around the screen. You can have brown, black, white silver, imperial purple, wine red or baby pink.

New Updated Features

The new Cookie Plus gets a bit more mass at 107 x 52.5 x 11.5mm against the older Cookie’s 106.5 x 55.4 x 11.9 mm and weighs 92.5 g. – 3.5 grams more. It seems the added functionality required some body heft.

You now have 3G on the dual band UMTS radio with HSDPA at 3.6 Mbps for the broadband internet speeds you need for surfing, downloading and social networking activities online.   Other than that, you get the same Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP as well as micro USD 2.0 for local data transfers.

Still no WiFi but that should account for its continued affordability. It’s also a quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE on the 2G network for internal roaming anywhere on the planet.

One imaging upgrade it gets is a digital zoom added to its basic fixed focus camera with 3.2 megapixel resolution and video recording at QVGA resolution and 12fps that the older cookie has. Its display technology remains unchanged with the same 3-inch LCD TFT resistive touchscreen with QVGA resolution and 256k color depth.  

There’s also a gravity accelerometer for auto rotate viewing and handwriting recognition. Entertainment on the road comes with the capable media players for audio and video files, Bluetooth A2DP for wireless stereo listening, a stereo FM with RDS and a 3.5mm headphone jack. It comes with a slim 900 mAh lithium-ion battery which when fully charges delivers up to 3.6 hours of talk time and 400 hours of standby time.

Software-wise, the LG GD500 Cookie Plus comes with a flash-based UI that gets a cartoon-like presentation reminiscent of the UI in the Samsung Corby line. It gets preloaded with a native Facebook client, a document viewer for PDF and MS Office files, LiveSquare peer management and an editable webpage screen capture app for sending via MMS.

A minor caveat to its update is a reduced internal memory storage from 48MB to just 30MB. Not really significant when you still get up to 1,000 phonebook entries and microSD support for memory expansion of up to 16 GB.