News For You

Contents :.

The LG VX8000 arrived via overnight fedex in a discreet brown box that contained a Verizon branded car charger, basic account info, and the LG VX8000 Kit. The Kit Contained the handset, Wall Charger, Belt Clip, Stereo Wire Style headphones with Mic, Lithion Ion Polymer Battery, Quick Start Guide, Quick Start CD, and Instruction Manual.

Case Design :.

I was incredibly excited to open up the package and to see the glimpse of the future. This was after all, a look into the next generation of phones before they were released. Sadly, the first word that came to mind when I saw the phone was “brick”. LG’s marketing team is going to have a hard time selling this phone on looks. A list of adjectives and nouns I’ve already used to describe the phone are, brick, solid, big, stackable, rectilinear. Coming from LG and Korea, a country that is devoted to making everything smaller and cooler it seems that this phone skipped the design desk and went straight to production.

There are a slew of buttons adorning the phone, The front panel is incredibly flat and adorned by several chrome accents. Really the pictures do not do justice to exactly how ugly this phone is in person.

Although the phone is quite large, 3.8 by 1.9 by 0.9 inches, the square edges make it seem bigger, but the phone is surprisingly light at 3.9 ounces.

Another odd quirk is that the display part of the clamshell seems to be heavier than the number pad side making the phone feel oddly balanced.

Screens :.

LG did do an incredible job with the screens. The Color LCD on the outside of the phone is a very high resolution, and the color is amazing. This allows the outside display to show lots of information including number of bars of service, services available, its own banner, 4 bar battery meter, date and time, and a custom wallpaper. From the front panel, you can also play mp3’s, take pictures or movies, browse pictures, read text messages, and view recent calls and make calls. This is all pretty impressive that you can do this with the phone closed.

Inside, there is a gorgeous display that has great color depth. Inside you can see the same network, battery, and date and time info as on the outside, plus another custom banner and wallpaper.

Buttons :.

Inside the Buttons are well laid out with shortcut keys, two softkeys, a dedicated camera button, and a roomy number pad with big numbers.

The side sports a camera button, a volume rocker, and a voice record button that doubles as a flash on/off button for the camera. This last feature is something I’d been hoping for ever since I got a phone cam. The front flip features a Stop/Play, forward, and rewind button layout that allows you to control your mp3s. The Camera on the front has a focus wheel that lets you specity Macro Mode or Normal mode for your portraits.

Call Quality :.

Compared to the Samsung and the Motorola phones I’ve used in the past, the call quality on this phone is not very good. The earpiece volume seems low and the caller seems distant. The speakerphone feature is nice, but the Motorola V710 definitely had a better quality speakerphone.

Reception :.

Reception on the phone seems decent. I found I was able to get EVDO service through my office and house. Although I did drop an EVDO video stream a couple of times.

Features :.

What the phone lacks for in design, it makes up for in features.

Streaming Video :.

This phone lets you download from Verizon Wireless’s library of Video on Demand. Although the selection is small, it is pretty good.

For news, you get CNN and NBC news, For entertainment you get E!, Sesame Street, and Just for Laughs, For Sports you get Fox Sports and ESPN, for Weather you get Accuweather.com.

After the first day, my phone told me I had downloaded over 90 Megs worth of content. I doubt I had used that much data on a cellular network in my entire life.

All the clips are free, and the quality is very excellent.

The streaming takes about 10 seconds to start for a 3-4 minute clip. You can either view the video clip in portrait or landscape mode. While I like the idea of Landscape mode, because of the distance between your eyes and the different angles they look at the screen, viewing the display in landscape mode is actually surprisingly difficult. I found my eyes being more comfortable with the smaller portrait resolution.

High Speed Web :.

It looks like Verizon has been busy working on Mobile Web 2.0 . Immediately it reminded me of the days when I used to dial into AOL or Prodigy. There are clear categories defining News, Email, Sports etc. These all lead to a web that has been sorted. And as far as I could tell all the sites were designed for Cell phones.

If you go the Search button though, you can enter in a URL. This loads up almost any Webpage and reformats it as best it can to fit the cell phone screen. This combined with Cable modem download speeds is a huge improvement over the Previous crap that they called wireless internet.

3D Gaming :.

Theres a new Category under Get it now called 3D Gaming. These games are all incredibly overpriced, ranging from about 8 to 9 dollars for a 3 month subscription. Curious to see if they were actually worth it, I went for the safe download. The 3D driving game.

Upon loading the game, I was very surprised by the sophisticated menus. Then upon starting the game, I was back in 90’s. The game reminded me a lot of the Need For Speed Series that became popular on the computer when I was in high school. The video was smooth, but was at a really low resolution. The graphics were true 3D with real 3D models of buildings, cars, and a destroyable environment. I was quite impressed with the quality although I’m not impressed enough to go downloading 50 dollars worth of games.

Camera :.

The CCD Camera on the phone is of much better quality than I have seen in the CMOS cameraphones from Motorola and Samsung.

The Camera has excellent low light abilities, gets great color, and makes very sharp photos in the sunlight. You can also set a self timer, the flash is the best I’ve seen so far, you can adjust the white balance, metering mode, and ISO. The only thing that bothers me about the phone is the low frame rate before you capture a picture. But for a phone camera, this is by far the best quality I have seen thus far.

You can also capture 15 second video clips using the Video Camera feature. The clips are low resolution and about 15 frames per second.

My only gripe about the Camera is that when you close the Clamshell with the camera on, the camera turns off. If you want to take a photo with the clamshell closed, you have to start the Camera again with the lid closed.

The Macro Lens allowed me to get pretty close to the subject with the subject sharp.

Stereo Headphones :.

The Stereo Headphones were a nice feature. The Microphone / Volume control / multi-function control button unit was a little high on the string, and made using the controls kind of awkward, but I guess it’s better to have the microphone close to the user’s head. The call quality goes up by using both earpieces. This actually makes the conversation seem more natural because you hear the other person’s voice in both ears.

Battery Life :.

Battery Life is decent when you’re not downloading tons and tons of videos all day. With Moderate usage, it seems like the battery will last at least two days. However, with a phone with this many features you can play with, I would recommend charging the battery every night.

Lack of Bluetooth and Memory Card :.

Being such a feature packed phone and for its size, I can’t believe that this phone lacks a memory card or Bluetooth. Without either it makes it very difficult to really use the MP3, video, and picture features of the phone without being charged an arm and a leg. This also means that you will have to get a cable to use the phone as a laptop and you will need to use special quasi legal software to get data onto and off of your phone.

This really cripples the usefulness of the phone. I was able to email myself pictures and midi’s to put on the phone, but it seems that Verizon blocks mp3 files.

Overall Impressions :.

I think this phone shows a lot of promise. It has an amazing array of features, but it seems to have lacked proper design. This looks like a phone that was designed around a specific feature set and not around user requirements. The phone lacks style, but makes up for it in well executed features. However, while the features are good, the menuing system, call quality, and convenience features are lacking.

Other than for tech Geeks, I probably would not recommend this phone to a normal user. And even with Tech Geeks, I might even recommend the Motorola V710 because of its removable memory card and its bluetooth.

Photo Samples From the Camera :.

Click to see enlargements of the samples. The phone has a focus ring, The macro seems to do ok, as seen in the watch photo. I think there must be something wrong with my non macro mode.

Pictures and Video of the phone :.

Here is a sample of the video quality of the streaming media. You need to have DIVX installed.