LG Intouch Max GW620 review

LG knows how to make a decent cameraphone - just check out the LG Viewty KU990 or the Viewty Smart GC900 to see the ability that the company can throw at a snapper.

That's also true in this Android phone - but it doesn't quite match up to the photography power of its siblings. We were impressed with the sheer range of options on offer, with the ability to change the ISO settings and picture modes, as well as face tracking within photos.

But we were left a little bit cold by the new fancy 'Auto Detect' face recognition feature on the Intouch Max GW620, as despite promising to be able to recognise people when taking a snap and then give you the chance to upload the pic to their social networking site, in reality the accuracy wasn't the greatest.

We like the feature as an idea - we just think that LG could have used this social networking phone a bit more intuitively. For instance, it would be better if you could just choose the person from a list by default, rather than making the phone do the work for you and it getting things wrong.

But beyond the fancy pants stuff it was a decent enough camera - the flash sparked well enough to create some good images, but a single LED flash like this isn't going to be bright enough to capture your friends in a nightclub or anything - rather just adding detail to close up shots.

Day to day shots came out well enough under normal conditions - the camera did take an age to process each snap, which meant that if you got one picture wrong you had to wait a long time to fix the problem, but apart from that we were reasonably impressed with the camera, probably rating it among the best of the bunch so far (which isn't saying much when the rest of the crop is similarly poor when it comes to Android cameraphones).

Video was a pretty fine effort on this device, with a smooth image captured by the D1 resolution lens, which managed to gobble up images at a great 30fps – making it much smoother than the iPhone 3GS for instance when it comes to taking video.

Again, sharing was an option here, and while this shows that the Intouch Max GW620 is very much a social networking device, we struggled on occasion to get it to work when we wanted it to.