The LG MM-535 phone offers a wealth of multimedia bells and whistles in a compact package. The phone itself measures 3.93” x 1.89” x .98” and it feels considerably smaller in your pocket because of its sliding design. However, inch for inch, you’ll notice that it’s a bigger phone. At 3.88oz, it packs 3.4 hours of talk time and supports 262K colors.

One of the big selling points of LG’s mobile phone is the ability to watch video clips and live TV through Sprint’s TV service. We created a small profile for ourselves that’s used to select channels like CNN (a special CNNtogo channel is available), Fox Sports and the Weather Channel, etc. The video on this device is considerably better than previous streaming video units we’ve seen, although it is not going to be as clear as playing local content, it’s a an improvement to units you could get from the previous year. We wished there were more selections to choose from, such as sitcoms and regular television shows.

We couldn’t go through the LG MM-535 phone without running some games through it and our Sprint PCS Vision phone came with a few games to show off its good controls and loud dual speaker setup. No matter what game we chose from Sprint’s library, we were able to run the game at full speed without any hiccup or slowdown. That can’t be said for some of the phones out on the market today that chug along on some of the graphically intensive games that mobile developers are beginning to offer.

Good audio-visual in games lends naturally to strong support for ring tones, screensavers and backgrounds. The ring tones, particularly the music ones, can be pretty loud so it’s good if you end up leaving your phone muffled in a jacket. Bad if you let it go off during a meeting.

With all the multimedia bells and whistles, we were concerned about the possibility of spiraling network charges but Sprint offers an all you can eat buffet plan for data charges. The call quality is decent but not out of this world. And signal strength and handoffs are pretty good, even when we tested the phone in a concrete jungle. Sprint offers the LG MM-535 phone at $379.99 US but at the time of writing, savings and specials bring it down to $199.99 US. Putting the phone on a plan will net even greater savings for existing customers.