The G5300 from LG Electronics is a good mid-range phone chock-full of goodies.

When a company enters the mobile handset market it often takes them a few attempts to get things right. Some companies, however, seem to get it right first time. LG appears to be one of those companies, possibly through its previous experience with CDMA mobiles.

The LG G5300 is slightly larger than the LG 7020, at 105mm x 46mm x 22mm and 85 grams, and it isn't a clamshell, either. However, it is a sleek phone with a 65,000 colour screen. The phone has the standard button layout, with two softkeys, and an answer and reject call button. It also has up and down arrows with a select key between them. Users may find getting used to using the select key a little tricky to learn.

The menu has eight messaging options, including the standard Call Register, Profiles, Settings and Call Divert - which are necessary but pretty much the same across all phones. However, the G5300 really stands out in some other menu options.

Messaging is handled exceptionally well on this mobile, although you can't choose whether to send and SMS or EMS -- if you add an image or sound to an SMS it simply becomes an EMS (Enhanced Message Service). The message can hold 918 characters, but naturally adding pictures or sound will take up multiple character spaces.

Like the LG 7020, the G5300 has super-predictive text, which LG calls eZi Text on this phone. Basically, after you've typed a few letters of a word, the phone displays the entire word -- or at least the most commonly used word containing those first digits. If it's not the correct word you keep on typing, until the one you want pops up. This makes typing longer words a breeze, but we doubt it will do away entirely with mobile slang, IOHO.

There are quite a few dozen little black and white pictures to add, sorted into categories such as "animal and plants", "for children", "human" and so on. With this variety, you're sure to find something you'll like. There are 15 different animations of little line drawing characters doing funky stuff, which is kind of cute, and 20 sounds to add as well. Of course, this will increase the number of messages used to send the EMS, and they only work if you send them to another phone that has EMS capabilities.

The messaging section also comes with a Memory Status so you can see how many more messages you can accept, and another feature we thought was nifty - a Name Card. This allows you to add your name, mobile number, office number, fax number and e-mail to a Name Card, and then simply add it to a message. This is a great and simple way to send your details to a new acquaintance.

The Organiser folder on the phone is a fairly simple affair, which allows you to set 20 schedules on a calendar -- including repeating them at regular intervals -- and the phonebook, which holds a respectable 200 entries on the mobile with three phone numbers, fax, e-mail and voice tag.

The "Fun & Tools" houses some interesting things. "My Folder" holds all the things you have downloaded to the phone, or had sent to you in a message. The Game folder house three games: Mobile Hawk -- a flying helicopter shoot 'em up; Othello -- a version of Reversi; and Crazy Race -- which is a car racing game where you can jump the car, but we're not sure why. We found the games to be reasonably fun and challenging, there are no cult classics but there is enough to prevent you getting bored waiting for a bus.

The Melody Composer has space for 35 tunes, and a reasonable interface. While not the easiest composer to use, it certainly wasn't the hardest either. We did find the ability to change the tempo added a further complexity to the creation of tunes.

The unit converter can be set for volume, length, area and weight, and the calculator does the basic equations. The G5300 also has "World Time", which allows you to cycle around the world to view the time in other cities. However, we have the same complaint with this mobile as we have had with others with this feature: The time is wrong. The time for Sydney is a good 14 hours behind the time the phone is set for, and we can find no good reason for this, nor any way to change it.

The G5300 comes with the Polyphonic Ring Tone and Data Tool Kit, a CD with three applications on it. We were pleasantly surprised when using the CD, of all the mobile software we've used this was the quickest to load, the simplest to set up and the easiest to use. The phone hooks up to a computer through the serial port. That's an unusual choice, as on most PCs it will see you digging around the cables on the back, while many desktop PCs now have front-mounted speedy USB ports.

The Internet Kit allows you to hook up a laptop to the phone to surf the net wirelessly through the phones GPRS capability, and the PC Sync claims to allow you to synchronise the phonebook, schedule and memo on the phone with Outlook. Although we found it easy to create files, edit files, delete files and just about anything else you can think of doing to files on both the phone and PC, we couldn't find the button to synchronise the two devices.

However, we were impressed with the other application, Contents Bank. This nifty piece of software allows you to transfer ringtones and pictures to your G5300. There are six empty slots on the phone that can be filled, and more than 150 ringtones to choose from to fill them. We found it hard to go past the "William Tell Overture" until we came across an American woman's voice calling "Honey! Hurry up and answer the phone!"

There are five spaces for images, which are created from images on your computer. The Content Bank loads a picture, which you can enlarge or shrink depending on what's necessary (shrink in almost all cases, we would imagine) and a small square indicates the area that will be cut out and transferred.

The battery life of the G5300 is fairly short, advertised at up to 200 hours talk time and up to 210 minutes talk time. We found it lasted just over two days of normal usage, which is not fantastic but not drastically bad either.

LG G5300
Company: LG Electronics
Price: AU$549
Distributor:  LG Electronics
Phone:  1800 725 375

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