Good small flip phone
Written: May 23 '07
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Pros: good ergo design, Mobile Web 2.0, many A/V features, easy to use voice dialing
Cons: VCast mostly a gimmick, calendar sync to Outlook is messy.
The Bottom Line: Good feature set, nice ergo/button layout, legible Mobile Web screen, SD slot, ignore VCast gimmick as irrelevant to a good phone.
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| ervan's Full Review: LG VX8300 V Cast Music Phone |
This is a good basic flip (clamshell) phone. Features work well, are reasonably complete, sensibly integrated, and are easy to understand.
Basics: small size, good battery life, (stereo) bluetooth, speaker phone, MP3 player, headset jack, voice memo, camera (bad in low light, but decent resolution and video mode in daylight), calendar, customized ring tones, pictures.
Unusual good features:
1) Voice dialing works without needing to train each name.
2) Voice dialing can choose home/mobile for each contact instead of defaulting to only one.
3) WAP/Mobile Web screen is big enough and colorful enough to be useful for real information (e.g. reading email through a portal or looking up a restaurant).
4) External (on the shell) voice command button is convenient.
5) VCast of video is good enough to watch (but selection is limited to various news updates, and it's $15/month).
6) Has micro-SD slot (bad news: you'll need it with only 10M free on the phone by default).
7) Camera shows current image on front (outside) screen so you can perfectly frame a shot of yourself.
8) 'dial' button brings up nicely organized redial/latest calls menu.
A few disappointments:
1) No easy way to turn bluetooth on or off (long menu sequence). Fortunately, it doesn't that much power to leave it on.
2) Front screen (outside of clamshell) is color, which means it's off by default, which means that missed calls or text messages are not immediately known (no external indication). However, you can press the "play" button on the front of the phone (without opening the clamshell) to see what you might have missed.
3) Songs cost $2 each, on top of paying for VCast. They can be separately downloaded to a PC (copy protected WMA file). VCast video is watchable, but limited to a few newscasts. So far, I'm not impressed that VCast is anything but a gimmick. Songs can be directly loaded onto a micro-SD card and played without VCast. Mobile Web 2.0 is only $5/month and available without VCast.
4) Power cord is slightly different than other LG power cords. It's easy to buy the wrong one.
5) Only serious problem: Synchronizing address book and calendar to your PC requires downloaded software and monthly fees, or expensive external kits (which my local Verizon knew nothing about). No solution is particularly good here.
5.a) mightyPhone - $3/month download from Verizon - this seems to mostly work. It syncs calendar and contacts, but the calendar it creates runs as a separate calendar program on the phone (instead of synching to the built-in calendar program
5.b) DataPilot - $50 3rd party software for sync over bluetooth-USB dongle. Many problems. Avoid.
5.c) Bitpim (freeware) plus USB to phone cable from Amazon.com (only $3). This works for synchronizing contacts, but the calendar part fails.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 100
Recommended for: Adventurous Technophiles - Tough and Durable
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Epinions.com ID:
ervan
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Reviews written: 6
Trusted by: 0 members
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