The tri-band P7200’s 105-gram weight is not something to text home about but is nevertheless impressive considering its generous feature set highlighted by the 2-megapixel camera, swivel form factor, music player functions and a generous 64MB of onboard shared dynamic memory boosted by a microSD expansion card slot.
Like most clamshells the P7200 sports dual screens. The 256k-color TFT internal display has a pretty decent 176 x 220-pixel resolution (although it would’ve been nice for LG to have gone whole hog and thrown in a QVGA 240 x 320-pixel display) while the 65k-color external one has a 96 x 96 resolution.
The handset comes with GPRS and EDGE technology for fast downloads of data. Sharing files was simple enough, thanks to the inclusion of Bluetooth and an IR port.
The P7200’s music player controls are on the outside of the phone to conveniently allow direct access. It plays MP3, AAC/AAC+, Real and WMA files and it has a TransFlash/microSD memory card slot capable of taking up to 512MB of memory. The P7200 also plays back MPEG4 videos.
As you might suspect from the design, you can operate the P7200 as a camera without flipping it open. Again, the expandable memory is useful here. Video capture resolution is 208 x 160 pixels at 15fps which isn’t great, but is par-for-the-video camphone-course. The 180-degree swiveling function allows a great deal of flexibility to picture taking.
Downsides? Just a couple. The first pertains to the P7200’s battery life. Even with a full charge in the morning, I find the battery meter hovering in the "low-batt" mark by late afternoon; with continued usage, the unit shut down by late evening. And that’s with moderate texts, calls and camera use. Too short considering most phones can do at least a 24-hour cycle.
My other gripe is the keypad’s slow response time relative to my lightning thumbs. I could normally key in "the quick brown fox" in about five seconds with most phones but if I try that with the P7200, I end up with something that is probably intelligible only to other life forms. Slow and easy SMS is the way to go with this LG. But that’s just me. Otherwise, I found the P7200’s overall user interface pleasingly intuitive.
All things considered though, LG’s P7200 has way more thumbs up than down. And it’s a device that will put LG squarely in the high-profile multimedia handset circle.