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The LG Cookie Fresh GS290 has a music player and this happily found music located at various places on a microSD card, pulling them into the music player software with no trouble.
There is a 3.5mm headset connector on the top edge of the phone. This is the ideal location. It sits in the pocket very comfortably with headphones connected, with no chance of snagging either clothes or the connector.
The provided headphones are worse than average, delivering fuzzy sound. Maximum volume is very high, though. The handset supports playlists, and you can designate any tune as a ringtone, startup tone or message tone.
When a tune is playing, each of the three main home screens offer a scrolling bar telling you what it is. But you can't tap that bar to pause or stop the music or to jump to the player, which is irritating.
The previously noted multitasking button beneath the screen gives you very quick access to the music player, though.
The FM radio will auto scan and has storage capacity for 48 channels. You can only see shortcuts to six channels at a time, though. They sit on a scrolling list at the bottom of the radio main screen.
This is annoying. If you want to switch between autoscanned channel one and channel 14 you'll need to do a bit of sweeping to get there, as there's no single scrollable channel list.
On the plus side, though, you can record from the radio, and can listen through the handset's speaker without bothering to attach the headset. This is a feature even the most advanced handsets usually fail to implement.
When it comes to video playback the LG Cookie Fresh GS290 is strictly limited. It recognised some of our MP4 samples but not others, preferring files of a small size and low framerate and declaring others as being an unrecognised format. It was unhappy with AVI, DivX and Xvid.
You're best thinking of it as good for showing what the camera shoots, and only a very truncated array of third party files.
