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Alltel's LG AX490 is a lackluster cell phone with one bright spot: a great keypad. Though there's really no other reason I can see that you'd want to buy this handset, the cell's FasTap keypad is a major step forward for texting on small phones.

PcMag reviewd the LG AX490 and here's what they say: Flip open the phone and innovation jumps out at you. You'll find Digit Wireless's FasTap keypad, which sports little letter keys, in alphabetical order, at the corners of the number keys on a traditional phone keypad. Three additional keys along the bottom handle shift, space, and symbols.

The keypad may look like a potential minefield of mistyping, but it actually works quite well because of a simple rule: If a letter key is mashed along with its adjacent number key, the number key wins. The little domed letter keys, meanwhile, are separated well enough that mistyping isn't an issue.

FasTap is well integrated into the AX490's interface, which is nice. You can dial, say, 212-PE6-5000 using a combination of letters and numbers, and pow, you'll be connected to the Hotel Pennsylvania at 736-5000. In the contacts list, hitting a letter key makes you jump to contacts beginning with that letter. And, of course, the keypad makes texting and IMing a joy (though it's a little slower than you'd expect, because it isn't a true QWERTY keyboard).

Unfortunately, the AX490 isn't a very good phone. Reception roaming on Verizon's network displayed decent numbers, but the AX490 dropped a few calls where the LG Chocolate VX8500 was able to keep them—and the Chocolate doesn't even have the world's best reception. In addition, I found sound quality using Verizon's network to be harsh and indistinct. The earpiece is quite loud, but the speakerphone is too quiet to use outdoors, and the microphone captures a lot of background noise. It's also annoying that the speakerphone doesn't work with the flip closed.

The phone's two screens are bright, but low-res, with the main screen clocking in at 128 by 160 pixels. Unfortunately, the external screen doesn't work as a camera viewfinder, nor does it show picture caller ID with the flip closed. Another disappointment is that AX490's Bluetooth wireless networking is crippled in ways that Verizon users will find familiar: You can use headsets and dial-up networking and transfer contact cards, but you are not allowed to send files, ringtones, or pictures over Bluetooth. In addition, there's no way to sync the phone with a PC.

The LG AX490 lacks an e-mail program, and the bundled WAP browser seemed cramped on the screen. These are both big downers because FasTap would have worked well with those applications. Browsing also was annoyingly slow on the AX490. The VGA camera takes soft-ish stills with hideous compression artifacts, and it doesn't record video. There's no memory card or MP3 music player, though there's an impressive 40MB of space for pictures, MP3-quality ringtones, and games.

Read full review on pcmag.