LG GW550 deals & review

The markets looking for a serious business smartphone but without straining their wallets have reason to celebrate the affordable QWERTY candybar smartphone LG GW550 from South Korea’s number two mobile phone maker after Samsung. The GW550 extends the same functional richness one finds in other upscale smartphones that at one look won’t betray its affordable price tag.

Features for the Serious Businessman

If your business takes you online more often than not, the GW550 can be your practical alternative. Measuring 116 x 62 x 12 mm and weighing 135.5g, it comes only in black so executives can use it with confidence and not get shocked interviewing an applicant with a yellow or pink version of his handset.

This phone supports basic PDA functionality with the messaging and browsing activities you expect to do. It runs on a standard edition Windows Mobile 6.5 OS and is preloaded with a document viewer for Adobe PDF and MS Office files, a WAP 2.0 HTML web browser, IM, standard email and push email client support.

It’s a 3G phone on the dual band UMTS (900./ 2100) with HSDPA at 7.2 Mbps and HSUPA at 2 Mbps for a no-wait internet browsing experience. It’s also a quad band GSM (850/900/1800/1900) with class 10 GPRS/EDGE for up to 236.8 Kbps data speeds on the 2G/2.5G networks. 

Its local data connectivity options start with its WiFi 802.11b/g for hotspot surfing as well the Bluetooth 2.0 and microUSB 2.0 for wireless and wired high speed local data transfers, respectively. There’s SatNav functionality with integrated GPS receiver that supports A-GPS

The display on the LG GW550 is a landscape 2.4-inch QVGA TFT LCD screen with 65k colors typical of most Windows Mobile smartphones. It sports a conventional 3.2 megapixel fixed focus camera and a VGA secondary camera at the front for video calls in 3G.

Multimedia gets no FM radio but you get the usual media playback support for audio files in the MP3/MP4/AAC/AAC+/EAAC+/WMA formats while MP4 is the only video codec supported. There’s a speakerphone but no 3.5mm headphone jack but its A2DP profile allows wireless stereo listening.

Internal memory is virtually nil but with practically unlimited phonebook capacity for contact entries, fields and call records.  You get microSD external memory slot expansion for up to 16 GB. There’s a 1300 mAh li-ion battery but talk times are not specified.