This shiny phone from LG has gained a lot of hype of late. Let’s check it out to see how good it actually is.
THE HARDWARE
The exterior of the phone is really reflective—sometimes to the point of irritation. However, it can become quite a highlight in a nightclub with good lighting. The screen is also shiny making it prone to fingerprints. Its shine also becomes a problem outdoors in daylight as the display is not bright enough to counter sunlight. The phone has an 800 mAh, 3.7 volt battery that has a life of around one and a half days with selective use of GPRS and Bluetooth.
The scroll roller is a really good concept and looks quite cool. However, its implementation is not that user-friendly. The interface doesn’t respond to quick rotations, so you can scroll only one line at a time. Going through menus is painful. You will find the scroll roller to be very unintuitive while viewing websites.
THE SOFTWARE
The menu structure has the standard LG interface, and can be shuffled between list or grid mode. Shortcuts come in the form of direct access to menu options by keying in number sequences. The menu automatically selects ‘Messaging’ as the default option for quick access to the messaging features. When composing messages, the number input mode can be selected by holding down the ‘*’ button. One gripe is that there is no option to add words to the T9 dictionary.
The phone can receive e-mail through the GPRS connection and there is a special e-mail box that stores these mails. Up to 40 mail messages can be saved in each account, and up to four accounts can be defined with 200 mails in total. One really cool feature is the Scheduled SMSes that can be pretty handy for scheduling birthday greetings or even for setting up SMS reminders for other people.
The phone can store up to 1000 contacts with multiple details. While saving contacts, you have the option of selecting SIM or phone memory for storage. Contacts can be assigned to groups that have specific ringtones and defined icons. The phone supports Bluetooth A2DP, so stereo headsets can also be used, plus there is the standard file transfer support. There is no option to transfer files from and to the memory card through Bluetooth, which is a glaring omission for a multimedia cable phone. Among the multimedia features is an MP3 player with support for bitrates up to 320 kbps, but there’s no support for variable bitrates. Also, you can set AAC and AAC+ files as ring tones.
The phone can be connected to PCs with its proprietary USB cable. It can be accessed from a PC using the PC sync application included in the package or the ‘Mass Storage’ device mode. However, the wireless features switch off while transferring data from a PC, therefore no calls or SMSes can be received in this mode. Strangely, the phone needs to have a SIM card installed for it to be used even as a mass storage device.
The 2 megapixel camera is placed on the rear of the phone. Its maximum resolution is 1600x1200 pixels. The camera application is quite nice and easy to use, but strangely there is no digital zoom in the still picture mode, even though the manual says so. There are controls in the camera application to enable and disable auto focus. This application can also take videos at 176x144 pixels and has digital zoom enabled on it.
VERDICT
The phone is really good as a fashion accessory but the features are average for its price.
The commercial spot
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