We open up the LG Lotus review with a look at Sprint's One Touch interface and all the surprising shortcuts onboard.
Review summary of the LG Lotus:
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 The LG Lotus is about as smart as a phone gets before we call it a smartphone, thanks mostly to Sprint's excellent new One Touch menu application. Despite its haunting resemblance to a compact makeup mirror, we even like the form factor, as it provides a nice, comfortable QWERTY keyboard and keeps a classy look. The external screen is unfortunately an afterthought, even with the dedicated music keys, and call quality could have been much better. But for dedicated messaging fans, even those with corporate e-mail to read, this phone provides an interesting alternative to the more complicated smartphone set. Plus, with access to Google Docs, a capable (though not desktop-grade) Web browser and tethered modem support, maybe this phone is even smarter than we thought. Knock $100 off the price, and we'll take two. Release: October 2008. Price: $100.
Pros: One Touch is great looking and convenient. Keyboard is tall and comfortable. Capable Web browser. Surprisingly good (and corporate) messaging options.
Cons: Call quality isn't great. Interface could react more quickly to navigation. Camera is lousy. Phone is pricey.
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Full LG Lotus Review:
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Design - Very good
The LG Lotus looks like a compact makeup mirror. There, we said it, and we're secure enough in our masculinity to like it, especially in the tattooed purple look (check Sprint's site for pics of that model). This form factor is becoming more and more popular, as the Verizon Wireless Blitz and the Samsung Propel on AT&T both hide their keyboards and take up about the same amount of space. But the LG Lotus is the prettiest of the bunch, and certainly the most classy, with a nice soft-touch paint finish and very large, easy-to-read keys.
The QVGA screen inside the Lotus was very clean, with great contrast that complemented Sprint's new One Touch menu app. The external display was more of a disappointment, a 176 by 220 pixel screen that was under-utilized, even by the music player, which gets dedicated keys on the exterior. Also, while we appreciated the dedicated key for voice dialing, we think the LG Lotus needs a key for messaging, placed right up front near the screen. Instead, this required some menu digging.
Interface design - Very good
Sprint's new One Touch menu app is a pleasure to use, and very useful, to boot. Basically, the app includes a menu bar, or "carousel," at the bottom of the screen. This carousel is made up of "tiles," each of which can access an app, provide information or jump to a specific phone setting. There is a tile for Web browsing that lets you jump right to the address bar or your bookmarks. CNN and the Weather Channel each get a tile, as do the Sprint Music player and Sprint Navigation apps. Google gets the most impressive tile, with access not only to Google search and Gmail, but also Google Reader, Google Docs and even Orkut, Google's social networking page. Not to be outdone, Yahoo gets a tile with access to Flickr and your Yahoo calendar and address book, and Facebook and MySpace each have their own tile. Mostly, these are simply bookmarks that jump directly to the mobile Web versions of their respective pages, but we like having these popular options front and center, and some of the tiles offer news and feed updates directly from the home screen.
Tiles can be moved around and edited, and the carousel can hold up to 15 different tiles, including one tile that is simply a shortcuts menu and another that offers personalization options for the One Touch app. The One Touch app can be a bit sluggish, and if you load up your home screen with the full complement of tiles it can be a pain to get from one side of the list to the other. However, the entire system is very good looking and offers more customization and convenience than you'll find on any other carrier's phones. While AT&T and Verizon Wireless are still trying to get their 5-year old icon menus to fit onto today's phones, Sprint is offering something new and smart.
Calling - Good
The LG Lotus had some nice calling options, helped along by some of the advanced features inherent in the One Touch app, but ultimately we were disappointed with the sound and call quality. On our end, calls sounded a bit distant, even with the volume cranked up to maximum. Callers reported a somewhat tinny sound, with static during calls, especially in the pauses between words. Sprint claims about 5.5 hours of talk time, and we got about that in our calling tests. Reception was strange, but not in a bad way. Actually, we found the LG Lotus roaming a bit more than we expected, but it still held onto 3-4 bars, even when those bars weren't coming from a Sprint cell tower.
One way the new Sprint interface could be improved is with a more robust contact list. We were impressed to find that Sprint's Outlook Web Access app could give us access to our Outlook contact list, and we liked that the phone could transfer these contacts to the phone itself, but this process seemed a needless chore. Obviously we would prefer a direct sync with our Exchange server, but that might be too much to ask for a consumer phone.
The phone gets a dedicated voice dialing button, and the speaker-independent voice dialing app worked perfectly in our tests. The speakerphone was also plenty loud, especially if we held the phone face down, with the speaker on the back facing us. Conference calling was easier on Sprint's One Touch phones than anywhere else, with multiple options for joining calls and a robust menu for multiple-call handling.
Messaging - Very good
The LG Lotus makes for an impressive consumer-QWERTY messaging device, thanks to its large keyboard and impressive host of messaging options. Just about every messaging platform is supported on this phone, including AOL, MSN and Yahoo for Instant Messaging; POP and IMAP support for e-mail, with plenty of presets; a corporate mail client for Exchange and Lotus Domino mail servers; and built-in links for social network sites such as Facebook, MySpace and even Google's Orkut. With all those options, we were disappointed that Google Talk was nowhere to be found, even within the Google carousel tile. Perhaps this could be added in a future update to the One Touch app?
The LG Lotus' keyboard worked so nicely because the keys are taller than they are wide, unlike the keyboard on some of the longer QWERTY-slider phones, like the Samsung Rant. This is a more natural layout for two thumbs, and it kept us from stretching uncomfortably. We wish the keyboard were smarter, with more dedicated symbol keys, like the @ symbol or even a comma key, and we always like when holding a key activates its respective symbol. On the LG Lotus, holding a key on the keyboard did nothing at all.
Multimedia - Good
The LG Lotus, as a Sprint Power Vision phone on the EV-DO network, gets access to Sprint TV for streaming video clips and Sprint's Music Store. The music store we liked. The skin for the music store looked crisp and clean on the LG Lotus' screen. We also found the phone to be smart for synchronizing with our Windows Media Player library. Not only did the phone find our music with no trouble, the synchronization was also very speedy over the phone's USB connection. Kudos to Sprint, as well, for pushing a standardized microUSB cable on all its One Touch phones (so far, at least). The LG Lotus comes with a 512MB microSD card, which is just enough for a couple playlists and a bunch of photos. We would obviously prefer a larger capacity, something in the gigabyte range. We also wish the LG Lotus would use a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, but instead the phone has a less-common 2.5mm port.
The Sprint TV service on the LG Lotus didn't fare as well as the music player. While the music player was basic for our tastes, the video player was blurry and choppy, with almost no playback controls. Videos could be played full screen, but at that size it was clear that we were watching a low-end streaming clip. We're ready for mobile TV to hit the mainstream, especially after trying to catch up with CNN's headlines on Sprint's stuttering video player.
Web browser - Good
The Web browser on the LG Lotus was quite capable, and did a fine job rendering the images on our homepage, but ultimately it didn't come close to the desktop-grade browsers we're seeing on modern smartphones. We were more impressed by how organized and convenient the One Touch app made jumping to our favorite mobile pages, including the mobile Facebook and Google Reader pages that we use often. Navigating long pages was also a chore, thanks to choppy click-browsing with the navigation button. Still, the One Touch app provides news feeds and quick access to pages we like, so we didn't spend much time futzing around with the browser itself.
Camera - Mediocre
The camera on the LG Lotus was unimpressive; standard cameraphone fare. The 2-megapixel shooter is poorly placed, too, on the lip of the external flap. This made self portraits difficult to line up, as the camera didn't use the external screen as a viewfinder. We'd like to see a lot of improvements, including auto focus, a self portrait mirror and perhaps an LED lamp, for starters. Photo management was fairly good, with plenty of messaging options for pictures as well as some presets for uploading pics to sharing and buying sites.
Self portrait
This self portrait is blown out and posterized, leaving a gradient of sunlight across our ample forehead. Also, all details in the shade are lost to darkness.
Neon sign
The camera couldn't focus on the neon sign in this dark lobby.
Glass building, Blue sky
This is the best picture of the bunch. Though there was plenty of noise in the purplish sky, overall the colors were okay and the scene was well rendered.
Street scene
Again, light, or the lack thereof, causes serious problems for the camera. Also, there isn't enough detail to appreciate the sunny bits in the distance.
GPS navigation - Very good
The LG Lotus uses Sprint Navigation for turn-by-turn directions. In our tests, Sprint Navigation worked very well, finding us quickly among the tall buildings in lower Manhattan and holding onto our location during our commute home to the suburbs. The app includes traffic information and plenty of points-of-interest. We especially like being able to jump right into a map or driving directions from the One Touch app, but here's one area where we wish Sprint would have gone farther. We wish that the One Touch menu could offer mapping information directly from the home screen, instead of opening the Navigation app every time.
Value - Mediocre
At launch, the LG Lotus on Sprint costs $150. With corporate e-mail options and all the other features on board, this isn't a terrible price, but there are plenty of phones now available on Sprint that have the same feature set for literally a third the price, like the Samsung Rant. The LG Lotus' price tag veers into smartphone territory, and in fact there are plenty of good Windows Mobile and BlackBerry smartphones that cost $100 or less. Still, this phone is a better value now with the Sprint One Touch interface.
Price and availability
The LG Lotus is available now on Sprint for $100, after a $50 mail-in rebate.
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