LG Secret – stylish and powerful

The LG Secret is a slider phone that looks good and promises a great deal. The problem is that it really doesn’t deliver as much as it should.

Certainly the handset, which is widely available as a contract mobile phone or as a pay as you go mobile phone, looks good. It’s thin, but set up to be hardy, utilising tempered glass for the screen, and carbon fibre for the body – just like a car, in fact. No one will be disappointed by its appearance.

People will love the keypad, too, which is ideal for texting, well laid out and sensitive. The keys vibrate when touched, a good extra feature that offers confirmation of actions.

However, that’s about as far as the joy extends. Yes, there’s a touchscreen, but it only operates in certain modes, which gives users a decidedly strange experience – really, the only use is for playing games.

The camera has a tasty five megapixels, and is set up for images, video and even slow-motion, which all sounds good, until anyone tries to use it in low light, when the lack of a Xenon flash means very ropey picture quality. It’s as if LG had started the job but never quite got around to finishing it.

Indeed, that’s really the main criticism of the phone. It’s full of good ideas that aren’t seen all the way through. For instance, there a 3.5mm headphone adapter, but not a 3.5mm headphone jack, which would have been more satisfactory and much easier.