The first impression you get about the new Puccini from LG (GT500 is its official nomenclature) is that its one of those slim and sexy new 3" touchscreen phones starting to flood the market. Targeting the less upscale mid range market for touchscreen with a tug at the fashion sense, LG has a winner in its hands.

A Great Value

For one, the Puccini is a palm and pocket-friendly mobile phone that is superlative in design and craftsmanship. There is nothing that stands out in terms of looks but it does provide one of the better options out there for a mobile phone of this size, design and feature set.

Talking about its feature set, again, there’s nothing outstanding about the Puccini that you won’t find in other offerings from main rivals Samsung, Nokia and Sony Ericsson, but this is one value package you shouldn’t miss when looking for a capable leading edge mobile phone that’s strikingly sexy besides.

Feature set to wow its markets

Unique and not-so unique features abound in the Puccini to make it a value deal. Here are some standouts:

• There’s LG’s WisePilot feature enabling users to locate and find new places with the help of map-based locators provided by its network.

• It comes with Dolby 2.0 sound processing that makes for a more engaging music listening experience on its music player.

• The handset allows tethering which makes it act like a modem over 3G or HSDPA networks to enable your desktop or laptop PC to access the internet

• Puccini is a tri-band GSM that supports high speed HSDPA for seamless 3G

Features at par with the rest

The Puccini can’t take on the competition without the features that are pretty much a commodity for the mobiles phones in its class and price range.

• It’s got a 3" LCD TFT screen with QVGA resolution supporting 256k colors for a really brilliant display even under the sun.

• A 5-megapixel camera with auto focus and LED flash gives the Puccini parity with other camera phones out there in terms of polish in the images and video it takes. It features geo tagging that stores the location where the photo is taken. It even comes with image stabilization, face and smile recognition.

• A secondary camera with lower resolution is at the façade for video calls over 3G networks.

• Multimedia players that support all the known audio and video formats popular among the hip crowd.

• There’s email and internet browsing features that support YouTube.

• Document viewers for MS and PDF files come standard as well.