I've had this phone for a few months now and have decided to do a review of it.
First of all, the reason I got it was because O2 had it on clearance at 50 euro so it seemed like a bargain and in fairness, it's not a bad phone, especially at that price. It does have enough faults that would make me think twice about recommending it to anyone. I'd recommend downloading the user manual if you're thinking about getting one so you can see how it works.
Look and feel
The phone looks nice and it feels good and solid in the hand. The slider keypad/touchpad is nice but when it's open the phone is totally unbalanced and really needs two hands so you don't accidentally drop it! As a result you never really use the keypad, which was one of LG's main marketing gimmicks! The user interface is reasonably well presented and has a decent amount of customisation available. The degree of customisation is limited by the way the phone restricts different content to the four different home screens though.
In use
Now, the bad points. The positioning of the touch-sensitive call button is a dreadful design decision as it is far too easy to accidentally touch off it with part of your hand when putting the phone down. If you happen to have a message or contact open... You can guess the rest.
The touch screen is responsive but has no calibration option. Even the hidden engineer menu doesn't seem to have a calibration option. As a result you have to put up with a phone which always seems to think you've pressed on a slightly lower position than you can feel with your finger. This disconnect between your perception and the reality can make typing on the screen a bit awkward and if you need to reposition the cursor in a text message it can be very frustrating.
In the contacts section, again it's too easy to hit off the "call" icon and end up calling someone without intending to. The phone has no confirmation option for calls, so when you press call that's what happens, there's no "are you sure" dialog, which I'm sure would have been an option if the designers had actually used the phone in testing. This is especially true in the PIN entry screen after power up. You can press the "emergency call" button by accident (due to the screen calibration issue) and it calls 112 straight away with no confirmation. Great, now I'm making nuisance calls to the emergency services!
The camera is very awkward to use. The whole point of having a camera built into your phone is so that you can take a picture quickly and with no fuss. With this phone, you have to try and get the camera interface up and running before you can even think about getting the picture framed and focused. You would think that you could just open the slider and press the shutter button at the side, but you'd actually be quicker going into the overview screen which has all the phone activities listed and starting it from there, especially if you want to record video. Once the camera is ready, it works reasonably well and the video is pretty decent quality, but colour balance tends to be quite a bit off under all but the best natural light. Perhaps there's an automatic setting for this.
The nice thing about the phone is that it has plenty of built-in memory. Well, you would think that, but what does it use the memory for? Certainly not text messages or message folders. You can only have about 500 messages stored in the phone (about 60k's worth of data) and you can only have about 10 folders set up for organising your messages. This is absoutely pitiful and LG must have had some real fools designing the software to come up with those limits. I guess it's not designed for heavy text users or people who like to keep their conversations. As a result you have to use LG's phone suite software which, like many others, is yet another flashy but usability-challenged, proprietary interface to take the data off the phone.
A number of times now the phone has also hung on me while playing back sound files (trying to choose a decent message alert and ringtone is another chore) which required a battery out-and-in operation which is pretty lame, especially in this day and age.
The web browser is not bad, but screen rendering options are pretty limited and you end up having to change the zoom level every time you go to a new page. The screen itself is very good and quite high-resolution, although my close-up eyesight is no longer good enough to really appreciate that.
The RSS reader is a nice addition, but not if you want to use it. All you can see are portions of the headings and if you want to read the rest it's into the web browser and change the zoom yet again so you can actually read the text.
The user interface is reasonably slick but for any scrolling screens which contain user content (like the contacts or message lists) the scrolling is sluggish and unresponsive.
I haven't had a chance to really test the bluetooth out but the wi-fi seems to be reliable and works well enough. The GMail and Google Maps mobile apps work well enough and go some way towards the redeeming the phone in terms of usefulness.
Final thoughts
Luckily I don't expect much from a phone other than something I can make calls and text with but this phone reminds me a lot of the PSP - It looks so nice and promises so much, but falls down in the implementation. There are far too many arbitrary limitations which make no sense at all and there appears to be no intention by LG to provide a software update to remedy the problems that it has. As a result I couldn't really recommend the phone to anyone who wants something that they can push to the limits.
Luckily I didn't pay too much for the phone, but if I had paid the original retail price I'd be demanding my money back and I would certainly never buy anything from LG in future. As it is, I'd definitely think twice before getting another LG phone in future. It has to be said that a lot of the usability problems probably stem from the use of their own OS, whereas if they had stuck with a well-tested and stable one like Symbian or even had an Android option a lot of these problem would have been fixable, bypassable or simply not there in the first place.
I would give the phone a 4 out of 10. Not impressed.
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