LG Town GT350

Available now
1st June 2010

Important note: LG claim that this phone has WiFi, but many readers claim that it does not. We trust our readers more that LG's press department, so if you need WiFi then we suggest you look elsewhere.

We first saw the LG GT350 back in February when the handset had been slated for an April release. Well, things have slipped a bit and now LG have announced that the GT350 should be available to consumers this month. Along the way, the GT350 has picked up some additional names, and it will be called the LG Town GT350 in the UK and the LG GT350 Tribe in Italy, but it appears to be just the plain GT350 in Germany.

The GT350 (or Tribe, or Town, or whatever you want to call it) is a messaging device aimed at social networkers, and priced at around €160 for a SIM-free version, which means that it isn't too expensive.

What you get for your money is a GSM handset with WiFi (according to LG claims, disputed by readers), a 3" 400 x 240 pixel touchscreen display, a slide-out QWERTY keyboard plus built-in social networking services (SNS).On the back is a fairly basic 2 megapixel camera, and the GT350 also has Bluetooth and microSD expandable memory.

Social networking support includes integration with Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Orkut and YouTube. LG say that the "Town" name comes from the user's ability to create their own communities of friends, although the Italian "Tribe" makes more sense to us. In fact, this is meant to be the first in a series of "Town" phones offering SNS to be launched in coming months. The inclusion of WiFi over 3G is a sensible one, as we would expect that many users will use the GT350 at home over their own WiFi networks quite a lot of the time. (Note the big disclaimer at the top of the page about WiFi).

One nice thing with the GT350 is the layout of the QWERTY keyboard. This is a four-row affair with most keys pretty much where you would normally expect to find them. The keys are well spaced, and LG say that there are a number of shortcut keys included to make the GT350 easier to use.

It's not just a social networking device, the GT350 also comes with a multimedia player, an FM radio and according to the specification sheet that we have seen, it also includes an FM transmitter. There appears to be a 3.5mm audio jack in the press photos too, although we have not seen any confirmation of this.

The camera is a bit on the basic side, and the video capture resolution of just 320 x 240 pixels at 12 frames per second isn't really going to look great on YouTube, but the stills photos should certainly be good enough for sharing snapshots.

The LG Town GT350 weighs 125 grams, measures 106 x 53 x 16mm, and the 950 mAh battery is quoted as giving up to 5 hours talktime and 7 days standby time.

LG say that the GT350 should be available this month in the UK, Germany and Italy in Aqua Blue, Light Silver, Black and Purple colour schemes, with other regions to follow later.