Up to 8 favourite contacts can be allocated to mini speed dial boxes that can be dropped on the standby screen. Tapping these pulls up quick dial and messaging options, plus contact editing settings.

Both are nice touches rather than essential functionality, adding to the user experience without being too tricksy or fiddly.

Easy navigation

Delving into the menus, LG's touchscreen operating system is clearly set up.

The screen reacts efficiently to pressing, with haptic feedback giving a brisk vibrating confirmation of button pressing onscreen. While it's not up to the smooth efficiency and user-friendly slickness of the iPhone's Multi-Touch system, it's a decent touchscreen set-up, particularly when you consider the price.

In the main menu, a vertical sidebar with icon-labelled buttons provides categorisation of functions under four headings – Communicate, Entertainment, Utilities and Settings. Tap on any of these and the grid of icons on the main part of the screen changes accordingly to the functions and applications for that category. Tap on one of the icon options and you either open up that function or get into sub-menu lists you can scroll through. It's well laid out and quite intuitive.

Most menus offer enough space to finger-flick through lists (though you can only do a few at a time, rather than an iPhone-alike spin-through), and the stylus can be used when necessary for scroll bars on longer lists.

Teeny keys

Text messaging and text input generally is fiddly though and can be frustrating.

When tapping in text, the phone automatically switches between a regular phone-style numberpad when the phone's held in a normal phone way, to a Qwerty keyboard when the phone's held sideways. While this theoretically adds to text usability, the layout of the numberpad when texting isn't great, and the Qwerty keys can be prone to mis-pressing.

In the numberpad options, the main text keys are restricted for space, with additional keys on the right of the display providing scope for frustrating accidental pressing of input options and so on if fingers go only slightly astray. It's certainly not as intuitive as normal texting on a conventional phone.

The small buttons on the Qwerty keyboard too require precise pressing to avoid typing mistakes; it's easy to brush against adjacent keys, particularly if you have larger fingers. The easiest solution, of course, is to use the stylus, but users may feel that something as basic as texting should be a breeze to operate out of the box rather than something that you have to master.

LG also provides a set of handwriting text input options for those who prefer to scrawl, though this may take some getting used to too.

Great music player

The Cookie mostly blends its touchscreen menu operation with familiar phone conventions, so it usually feels comfortable to get to grips with its operating system.

Its music player has a typical set of categories, and tracks are listed under the headings in easy to scroll order. You can hunt by text search as well as finger swiping, and a shuffle option is listed alongside the track, album, artist, genre and playlist options. The player in action on the large screen is reasonably attractive and straightforward to use without offering anything exceptional.

Supporting MP3, AAC, AAC+, WMA and RA files, the Cookie can be synced via the supplied USB cable with Windows Media Player on a PC, or tracks can be copied using LG PC Suite software or dragged and dropped.