LG Viewty Snap GM360

There’s something homely about the new Viewty Snap, the budget handset in the well-received Viewty range.

It’s probably the default wallpaper and fonts that first create the feeling, with the background and text resembling one of those hand-drawn pictures you see in old illustrated children’s books. The sort of book where the most exciting thing to happen is having tea with grandma.

This feeling of quaintness extends further than just the aesthetics of the device though, as the Viewty Snap’s bargain price and missing features harken back to an age when everything was a lot less complicated.

That’s not to say the phone looks like an '80s brick. While the depth is bordering on pocket-bulging, the rounded contours, 3.5mm jack, and soft indented buttons at the side hint at a more modern design.

The touchscreen is a reasonable 3-inch affair which, while not perfectly accurate, is fairly responsive when compared to similar devices in the price bracket.

The addition of a gesture-activated quick unlock is a neat touch (apologies), but the way the interface hides related functions like touch controls and settings in three different places is a little annoying.

The interface as a whole is crammed with icons and settings, spread out across multiple pages. The ability to place widgets on the home page eases the confusion slightly, but it still felt oddly muddled for a phone focused on two things – calls and photos.

The key feature on the Viewty Snap, other than the excellent addition of the headphone jack port, is the camera, coming in at a surprisingly decent five-megapixels with flash and auto-focus.

For a phone that retails for around £70 on PAYG, it’s a monster, putting the slightly higher priced Samsung Monte’s three-megapixel model to shame with a good range of settings and high quality pictures.

The addition of a strong camera has meant sacrifices elsewhere in the device, none more so than the lack of 3G and wi-fi connectivity, making net connections slow and unwieldy. The option’s still there though, if you get desperate.

There’s also no GPS included inside the phone, which makes the feeling that the phone is very much a tribute to the camera phones of old even stronger.

In terms of games, there aren’t any accelerometer or multi-touch antics here. Instead the GM360 makes do with the single-touch Java releases, with the preinstalled games like Gameloft’s Ferrari GT Evolution playing fairly poorly on the touchscreen.

Priced any differently, the LG Viewty Snap would be almost impossible to recommend.

The interface is clumsy and the lack of 3G, wi-fi and GPS limits its versatility when placed against nearby competitors, but at the same time it has one of the best cameras you can get in a phone at this price.

Unless you’re dead set on phone photography though, the Monte at £20 dearer is the better choice.