Boasting a sleek black finish and bearing a striking resemblance to the popular LG VX8500 Chocolate, does this music-focused 3G clamshell taste sweet or leave a bitter aftertaste?
Review summary of the LG VX8600:
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 Though we appreciate the smooth design and impressive video playback of the LG VX8600, every other feature on the phone (a follow-up to LG's VX8500 Chocolate) is playing catch-up. While the VX8600's calling and messaging features make the grade, the much-vaunted audio player on this music-focused phone is average, at best, with no music accessories to help the user get started. Even the touch-sensitive buttons have long lost their desirability, as plenty of phones use this feature and none of them well. Overall, we can't help but feel the VX8600 has been outclassed by other phones, such as the Nokia 5300 or LG's own CU500. Release: November 2006. Price: $130.
Pros: Slick, classy design; great streaming video handling; speaker-independent dialing; competent messaging and calling.
Cons: Audio options are sub-par; camera is lousy; lack of necessary accessories; spotty GPS reception.
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58%
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Full review of the LG VX8600:
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Competition
Find out how well the LG VX8600 competes with similar multimedia phones:
LG VX8600 vs. Samsung SPH-M610 vs. Samsung SPH-M500
Design
With its shiny finish and touch-sensitive music buttons on the face, the LG VX8600 (the flip-phone version of the VX8500 Chocolate slider) most closely resembles the red-hot Motorola KRZR K1m. The VX8600's glossy piano black case is a fingerprint's dream, but even spotted with prints the phone retains its classy gloss, thanks to the gleaming chrome band that rings the top shell. The screens look sharp and detailed, especially the 65,000-color external screen, which doubles as a spare viewfinder for the camera and camcorder. Finally, the menu on the VX8600, while not quite as slick as the Chocolate's all-Flash interface, is still a breath of fresh air compared to the standard Verizon Wireless menu setup.
Audio - Mediocre
For a phone that wears its musical intentions on its outer shell, the music experience on the LG VX8600 is disappointing. The phone lacks a USB cable, memory card, and software drivers out of the box; all of these must be purchased separately. Once installed, Windows Media Player required numerous re-installs and restarts to recognize and synchronize the phone's music. With no USB 2.0 support, the transfer process was quite long, taking more than an hour to fill our 2GB card. The music player itself was basic, with no equalizer or visualizer options. The V Cast store boasts impressive searching and browsing functions, but the interface would only display a frustrating two songs at once, so plenty of scrolling was required. The touch-sensitive buttons on the phone's face worked well enough and rarely went off accidentally, but they time-out too quickly, requiring you to press another button for them to come back to life. In the end, we prefer hard buttons that allow one-touch access to music, like those on the Nokia 5300 XpressMusic. On the plus side, stereo Bluetooth setup couldn't have been easier.
Video - Very good
Surprisingly, the LG VX8600 does a better job handling video than audio. The V Cast video store selection is comprised of small clips, nothing more than five minutes long, but the catalogue is entertainingly wide. Plenty of comedy clips from Comedy Central are offered for free, and music videos are available for paid download. Our videos took full advantage of the VX8600's screen real estate; in fact, the clips we played seemed limited more by their aspect ratios than the screen size, and we could switch between portrait and landscape views for a wider look. Music videos took a couple of minutes to download, but then ran smoothly, with only the occasionally hiccup and never a real pause in playback.
Calling - Good
Calling on the LG VX8600 is an average affair; we noticed a bit of static during our calls, especially when reception in our Manhattan office dipped to two bars or less. The speakerphone was a bit louder than average phones, but the sub-par contact list is saddled with a dated-looking interface and a paltry number of fields, although while-you-type searching did help us navigate the contact list. We definitely appreciate speaker-independent voice dialing, accessible at the touch of a button, but found the lack of 3-way calling puzzling. The phone can use music files as ringtones, so long as they have been purchased through Verizon's V Cast service.
Messaging - Good
Messaging was handled competently on the VX8600, but presented nothing new or exciting. Instant messaging is handled through AIM, MSN, and Yahoo. The SMS client displays a lowly 75 characters on outgoing messages, but can show all 160 characters of an incoming SMS. You can enter contacts into the "To:" line of an outgoing message, but the phone will not auto-complete the contact name while you type. Typing on the flat keypad was not difficult, though navigating with the soft keys and four-way button occasionally produced misfires. Text looked a bit blocky throughout the phone, especially in the messaging functions.
Camera - Mediocre
Clearly an afterthought, the LG VX8600's camera takes lousy, blurry pictures with colors that are nowhere near consistent. The phone saves pictures to its own internal memory, then requires you to transfer them individually to your memory card. Camera options, such as white balance or brightness, had little effect on overall image quality. The photo album allows you to zoom in on photos, and nothing else; no cropping or editing capabilities are available.
Accessories
As usual with Verizon Wireless' multimedia phones, all accessories that would make multimedia a better experience -- namely stereo headphones (or even earbuds), a USB connector, and a microSD card -- are sold separately, and Verizon doesn't even include a software disk with drivers for Windows Media Player. The included headset adapter would be useful if it adapted to 3.5mm standard headphone plugs, but instead only works with 2.5mm handsfree microphone headsets, which should have been included anyway.
Web browsing and GPS - Mediocre
Surprisingly, the LG VX8600 managed to load the lengthy The New York Times homepage, complete with most of the links and images -- a feat that's beyond the capabilities of most non-smartphones. Unfortunately, blocky text with a thick, bold-looking font on the browser keeps Web pages from being as legible as we'd like, and scrolling through the long single columns requires lots of clicking, with no zooming or layout options to ease the struggle. GPS navigation is handled through VZ Navigator, but we had difficulty finding a GPS signal with the phone in New York City or the northern New Jersey suburbs.
Related phones: Multimedia phones
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LG VX8500
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Score: 50% When: July 2006 Worth: $50 Carrier: Verizon Wireless
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LG is looking to topple the Apple iPod with its slick VX8500 (a.k.a. the Chocolate). Does this eye-catching slider have what it takes to knock off the Goliath of portable music?
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LG CU500
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Score: 50% When: July 2006 Worth: $50 Carrier: AT&T
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Will the LG CU500, Cingular's first foray into the speedy world of HSDPA handsets, lure customers to all that 3.5G has to offer? Philip Berne puts the new clamshell through its paces.
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Read » Gallery »
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Price and availability
Available now from Verizon Wireless, the LG VX8600 retails for $130 with a two-year service agreement.
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