LG In Touch Max

Smartphones have been a little exclusive, thanks to their high price tag, either upfront or the monthly contract cost.

The LG In Touch Max is an effort to change this, it's an Android-based phone with a slide out keyboard avaiable at no extra cost on £20 a month contracts from T-Mobile or £22 a month from Virgin Media.

It big enough to make the most of photos and videos on the screen but not so big that it won't fit in a pocket. It has a standard microUSB for charging, a 3.5mm socket for headphones of your choice and the microSD card can be accessed from the side without having to remove the battery. Not forgetting a five-megapixel camera with flash. All good stuff, all better than we'd expect from a phone at this price.

The slide out keyboard is even better. It's four lines rather than the normal three so you can access the numbers without a modifier key. It makes a big difference and is much easier to type at than three line alternatives.

The Android operating system is good enough that you don't have to use the keyboard for quickly checking messages. We did find the two touch buttons for Home and Back on the front a little too sensitive

The camera has some clever tricks, it will try and recognise faces in photos and once recognised, photos can be tagged in Facebook automatically. The phone also bundles social networking into a single place with SNS, social networking service for Facebook, Twitter and Beebo. Contacts be linked to their social networking profiles.

The camera took some good photos while I was out and about but I did have some difficulty getting them off the phone and ended up emailing them to myself.

The web browser is good and supports the equivalent of tabs so you can have several pages open at the same time.

Over the course of a weekend I've come to like the LG In Touch Max a lot. As long as you've got a generous data allowance like both the contracts I mentioned earlier, this is an excellent phone.