Has the sequel to the popular LG Rumor come late to Sprint's compact messaging party? Has Samsung eaten all the snacks? Find out in our LG Rumor 2 review.
Review summary of the LG Rumor2:
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 The LG Rumor2 is a sequel to one of the original compact messaging phones with a full QWERTY keyboard (check our comparison of recent compact QWERTY phones here.) The LG Rumor2 gets the design part mostly right, but ironically fails to keep up with the Samsung Rant, a phone that is a better sequel to the original LG Rumor than the LG Rumor2. We think that budget-conscious messaging users might be enticed by the phone's Outlook Web Access for corporate e-mail and contacts, and those folks won't mind the lack of 3G, as well as the lack of the Sprint Music Store and Sprint TV. But the younger crowd will miss the social networking and fun applications that make the Samsung Rant a better choice. Until Sprint drops the price (to $0), or adds One Touch functions, we say go for the Samsung Rant. Overall, the LG Rumor2 is simply an underpowered clone of a phone that stole the show it wrote. Release: March 2009. Price: $30.
Pros: Improvement over the original LG Rumor. Better keyboard, better interface. Nice, advanced e-mail app.
Cons: Haven't we seen this before? Lacks 3G. Few fun or new messaging options, like Facebook or Gtalk. Ineffective Web browser.
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Full LG Rumor2 Review:
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Design – Good
The LG Rumor 2 is a side-sliding, full QWERTY messaging phone, built more for consumers than the business crowd, though the phone does hide some surprisingly useful work features. We liked the design of the original LG Rumor, though we thought the interface could use some sprucing up, which is why we really appreciated the Samsung Rant, one of our favorite phones of last year. The new Rumor 2 plays like an underpowered version of the Rant. It lacks 3G networking, and all the additional Sprint services that come with their Power Vision network. It also lacks the One Touch user interface that we liked so much on Samsung's phone.
There are slight improvements. The LG Rumor 2 uses a nicer screen than the Samsung Rant. It comes in at a higher resolution, 240 by 320 pixels, and for most purposes, it looks great, with deep, dark blacks and sharp colors. Unfortunately, the phone lacks any advanced options to seriously take advantage of the nicer screen.
We like the keyboard on the LG Rumor 2, which gives the numbers their own row up top, but we don't like the way the letters in the lower left-hand quadrant butt up against the edge, out of reach. On the other hand, we're vexed as to why Sprint wouldn't endow it with One Touch. We loved One Touch on the Samsung Rant and the LG Lotus. It's a cool looking interface with customizable tabs that let you access popular Google features and even Facebook directly from the menu screen. By contrast, the LG Rumor 2 lets you access your Sprint account or your media files. Would you rather check your Facebook, or your phone bill?
Calling - Good
Calls made on the LG Rumor 2 sounded okay, but not great. We heard a faint, crackly sound on both ends, and callers reported a breathiness to our voice that made us difficult to understand if reception dipped too far. Reception on the phone was pretty good. We usually had 3-4 bars of service, even as our other Sprint phones reported a weaker signal. Battery life was also solid. We got more than 6 hours, 15 minutes. We did have a strange issue with the battery, though. The phone dropped from reporting 2 bars of battery life to alerting us of imminent power loss. This still didn't affect the amount of talk time we got.
The address book was fairly basic, with all the essential fields but nothing special. The Rumor 2 does have a neat trick up its sleeve for corporate users. We were able to copy contacts, one at a time, from our Outlook Web Access e-mail to the phone. We always like an automatic address book sync, either with our online address books at Gmail or Yahoo, or over the computer. The corporate e-mail address book is a nice bonus, but we're not sure how many buyers considering this phone will use it with a Microsoft Exchange account.
The keyboard on the LG Rumor 2 is nice, an improvement over the stilted keyboard on the LG Rumor. It has an extra row of keys and plenty of space, bringing it in line with the keyboard on the Samsung Rant. In fact, the two were nearly identical. The LG Rumor 2 has a dedicated smiley key, while the Samsung Rant has a dedicated messaging key. The Rumor 2 jumps into messaging when you slide open the keyboard, so this wasn't as necessary. The "Z" and "X" keys were a little too close to our thumbs, but this is a minor complaint. Overall, we like the form. We think the compact QWERTY slider is going to be a popular design for years to come.
Messaging – Very Good
The Rumor 2 has some nice messaging options. The phone gets a threaded style of SMS. That means that it groups your SMS conversation with a specific contact into a single window, and it looks more like an IM chat. Actually, the threaded messaging looked pretty ugly, more like a system menu than the friendlier chat windows we like on the Palm Centro.
Unfortunately, the Samsung Rant, with its One Touch interface, has a few key additions that we think make it a better messaging phone. And considering the two are the same price on the same carrier, we'd rather go for the phone with a built-in Facebook tab on the home screen, and the better Web support for Google apps and services. That isn't to say that the Rumor 2 doesn't have some nice features. Like the Rant, the LG Rumor 2 gets an advanced e-mail client. It can even handle our corporate e-mail through Outlook Web Access. Still we think that corporate e-mail users aren't this phone's true audience, and LG should have bundled more social networking and chat applications to appeal to the younger crowd.
Multimedia and Web browsing
The LG Rumor 2 choked on all of the real, desktop-size Web pages we tried to load. It couldn't manage our site, and the Polaris browser crashed trying to load our homepage. Even mobile pages like CNN's WAP page took a long time to load, and looked surprisingly bad, considering the phone's respectable, QVGA-resolution screen. Text looked skinny, not smooth. Even Sprint's own portal site was slow to load and looked pretty barren. With the slower 1xRTT networking, instead of the faster 3G EV-DO networking, this phone isn't the right choice if you want to do any serious Web browsing.
Without 3G networking, the Rumor 2 also lacks access to Sprint's Music Store (and Sprint TV, if that's your thing). Still, the phone has a basic, though capable music player built in. The music player had no trouble finding our music already preloaded on an 8GB microSD card. The LG Rumor 2 can handle cards up to 16GB, and comes with Stereo Bluetooth support. Album artwork didn't come through in the media player, and the player didn't keep singing in the background as we performed other tasks. Also, the phone uses a smaller, sub-standard 2.5mm headphone jack, instead of the 3.5mm jack found on all our favorite cans.
The 1.3-megapixel camera on the back of the Rumor 2 loses the megapixel war to the 2-megapixel shooter on the Samsung Rant, and image quality also suffers a bit. Really, neither phone was too impressive, but the pictures we got on the LG Rumor 2 were especially dreary. We shot pics at our local fruit market, and all the fruits and vegetables took on a grayish, lifeless cast. Our self portrait came out okay, but in low light, the camera needed a flash.
GPS Navigation – Very Good
Considering the slower networking speeds, we were actually fairly satisfied with GPS performance on the LG Rumor 2. Sprint Navigator worked as smoothly as it usually does, and we hardly noticed any lag in loading up new segments of the map. The phone also found us quickly and tracked us accurately both on foot and driving around in Manhattan and the New Jersey suburbs.
Price and availability
The LG Rumor2 is available now from Sprint for $50 with a contract agreement.
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