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Where the LG Optimus GT540 will either wow you or irritate you beyond all understanding in its offering of two different skins.
Android has its very own look and feel, and many of the phone manufacturers who choose to use it opt to skin it, adding their own tweaks, twists and turns in a bid to personalise things in their corporate image.
LG has tried to offer users the best of both worlds by allowing you a vanilla Android or a liveried LG skin. You can flick between the two by choosing the Home Selector app in the main applications menu.
Choose LG's own skin option and you get the ability to decide how many home screens you want to play with – three, five or seven. You can also decide on a theme. How about Pink Coco or Modern Silver?
We'd have liked the home screens to automatically grow in number up to seven, as we add new widgets rather than have to make a physical choice, though.
The 600MHz processor is surprisingly nippy for a phone of this price - it's the same spec as the one used in the iPhone 3GS and although it lags, it generally reacts to the gestures you ask it to perform.
It can be slow to run apps, and slow to manage data too. It isn't a big enough issue to be a deal breaker, but we would suggest that you shouldn't expect lightning speed from this phone at times.
Also the resistive screen is a real problem when trying to drag down the top notifications bar. You see you've got an email to look at and what a quick glimpse of it, but trying to pull the relevant section of the screen down is nigh-on impossible with the LG Optimus GT540.
Another tweak LG offers is to group applications in the main menu. You just need to hit the menu button when you are in the main apps menu to add new categories, and then move applications into them by dragging them. You get between categories by vertically scrolling.
When it comes to widgets, LG has some rather nice offerings. We especially like the note widget, which can be used to store all kinds of information. You flick through different notes with a horizontal finger scroll. We can see it being used for shopping lists, short to-do lists and all kinds of quick-fire information gathering.
