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LG has gone for an interesting take on contacts for the Intouch Max GW620, as despite its early 1.5 version of Android it has chucked in some cool social networking opportunities into the mix.
Where before you had your basic list of phone friends for contacts in the same window as the phone dialler and your favourites, the new way LG wants to do things is to divide the menu up into new tabs, with your favourite people given their own separate application.
This means you can see the phone dialler and call log in the contacts list as usual, but there's also the option to open up the phone to see groups as well, so you can chuck your buddies under labels.
The contact list is large and well laid out, with a simple flick taking you miles down the list, and a tab at the side of the screen allows you to sort your contacts by name as well - this latter function actually works, unlike some other Android devices we don't care to mention *cough*MotoMilestone*cough*.
LG has skinned the contacts list in a similar way to its S-Class interface, meaning wide open spaces for the finger to strike and an easy-to-hit call button next to the picture of each person.
And as we mentioned earlier, social networking is a big part of this phone, with Facebook, Twitter and Bebo all thrown in there for good measure. The only real use for them is to link them with your friends so that the photo from their online profile synchronises with their phone version too, although there is further functionality if you're willing to dig.
When editing a contact you simply have to link them in with their Facebook or Twitter account from the list on the phone to add that element to their profile (a word of warning though - if you accidentally link the wrong profile that photo will stay on there even if you eventually find the right one).
However, this isn't as intuitive as you might hope, especially with the Twitter application - not only does it only show around seven people on a list when you're searching for your friend (with you having to load a new list for a few seconds to bring up a new set of people to choose from... annoying when you've got 500 or so followers) it also sometimes won't synchronise with the chosen person anyway.
But once you have got the right people and profiles together, it's again not the most useful element to have, as there's no way to message them or anything - just the opportunity to see their statuses and link them into the profile to provide an easy way to synchronise their information – although we now expect a little more than just a direct link to their profile from a phone of this calibre.
Calling was adequate on the Intouch Max GW620 – we found the speaker to be of reasonable quality, although we weren't blown away by the clarity of any phone call.
However, coverage was pretty good – although when the phone did decide to roam, it wanted to stay there rather than switching back to 3G, which was pretty aggravating when we knew that there was 3G available.
