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| Review: LG U400 mobile phone |
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| Written by Rene Millman | |
| Wednesday, 31 January 2007 | |
 This mobile phone is an exclusive to the 3 network in the UK and elsewhere in the world and LG's attempt to have a proper MP3 player-cum-phone in the market place (although we think music-playing phones will have a real tough time when the iPhone finally appears outside of Steve Job's hand).
The first thing you see with this slide phone is the thumb wheel. This
pretty much can control much of the phone's functions, but as we will
see later, there are problems with it. The actual phone size itself is
light enough (114g) and small enough to slip into your handbag or
pocket, it is very unobtrusive. The design of the phone seems to be a
typical Korean style, hard to explain that really, other than it does
look a bit like it could be a Samsung phone (but maybe that style of
phone goes down well in Korea!)The screen is a very good size and very bright. In fact, the battery life seems to be very good for a 3G phone (well they do seem to drain the batteries compared to GSM, don't they) so no complaints from this reviewer regarding not being able to make a call because the battery is dead, it didn't once happen when reviewing this phone. Dialling out is easy to do and subsequently, texting is easy enough to do as the keys are very responsive and the predictive text function seems to accurately predict what I want to write (how many times have you written book instead of cool?). Call quality was very good and we didn't experience any dropped calls. Using the menu is just about OK, the thumb wheel isn't that good to use (especially if you are used to how well Apple does this kind of thing with its iPod). We did find that using it to navigate the menu could be a hit or miss affair at times and sometimes frustrating as the wheel would spin around to the next option instead of the one we wanted to access. This was semi-rectified by changing the menu structure from a wheel a more normal looking grid of options. The web function works well enough. As this is a 3 phone, you can pay as you go for internet access. The browser isn't really cut out for displaying normal desktop-optimised web pages so is much better with displaying pages from 3's music store or Yahoo mobile pages (these phone companies should really consider bundling Opera's mobile browser, it really does the business when displaying all web pages on phones). The phone really comes into its own with music. With a set of earphones (luckily you can use any headphones you like - none of thisproprietary nonsense) the phone reproduces music very well and if you don't have an iPod, this will make a suitable substitute. You can also use the phone's Bluetooth function to stream music to a suitably equipped pair of loudspeakers using A2DP. There is also the obligatory camera that does its job reasonably well enough to merit its inclusion in the package. 3's website has this for free with a £15 per month tariff. Rating: 7/10 |
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