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LG has released several lines of messaging phones in recent years, including the LG Rumor series, and the LG Cosmos series. Recently, the company has incorporated touch-screen displays with the more-basic messaging phones, resulting in hybrid touch-screen and keyboard handsets like the LG Rumor Touch and the more recent LG Cosmos Touch.
Adding a touch screen to the Cosmos certainly bumps it up from a basic entry-level phone, but it's definitely not high end. The touch screen requires plenty of patience, and the rest of the handset's features are midrange at best. The Cosmos Touch is a decent messaging phone, but its price of $79.99 may be a little too high for what is basically an average handset.
Design
Measuring 4.05 inches long by 2.08 inches wide by 0.65 inch thick, the Cosmos Touch is small and compact, especially for a touch-screen phone. It's wrapped in a layer of soft touch material, and the rounded corners of the phone contribute to a comfortable feel in the hand. At only 4.37 ounces, the Cosmos Touch is lightweight and very pocketable as well.
Because of its small stature, the Cosmos Touch only has a 2.8-inch display, which isn't the greatest size for viewing videos or browsing the Web. Still, this basic phone isn't really meant for that. Graphics and images are bright and colorful with 262,000-color support and a 400x240-pixel resolution. You can adjust the backlight timer, the wallpaper, the charging screen image, display themes, the font type for text and dialing, and the clock format.
There's also a shortcut bin feature on the Cosmos Touch that you can toggle on or off. When it's on, you'll see a small arrow on the left side of the home screen. Press it and a pop-up array of various applications shows up. You can then drag and drop these widgets or shortcuts to the home screen for quicker access to them. Of course you can also drag them to a trash bin to remove them. At the bottom row of the home screen are shortcuts to the messaging menu, the phone dialer, the main menu, and the contacts list.
The one downside to the touch screen is that it's not very responsive. As a resistive display, the Cosmos Touch requires a bit more pressure and patience than capacitive touch handsets. Launching apps does not feel as instantaneous, and we needed to use our fingernails to ensure accuracy. The Cosmos Touch does have vibration feedback and a calibration wizard to help improve the tactile feel of the display, but it doesn't quite do the job for us.
Luckily, the phone does have a few physical keys. Underneath the display are three large keys for the Send, Back/Voice Command, and End/Power functions. The volume rocker and Micro-USB charging port are on the left; the camera key, screen lock key, and microSD card slot are on the right. The camera lens is on the back, and we're glad to see a 3.5mm headset jack on the top.
