LG Neon – A Semi-Touch Screen Cell Phone Review

Neon is a phone by LG which has multi media, camera, messaging features which makes it a typical multi media phone.

Sum and Substance:

Thumbs Up:

Stylish and compact, spacious keyboard, a music player, 2 mega pixel camera, good call quality, inexpensive.

Thumbs Down:

Slow EDGE and no 3G, touch screen can be used only for dialing.

Inside the Trunk:

Technology: GSM
Band: 850/1800/1900 (Tri-Band)
Phone design: Slider
Caller ID: Yes
Other features: MP3, Camera, Messaging, Calculator, Stopwatch, Bluetooth 2.0 EDR etc.

The Whiz Kid Speaks:

2.4 inch TFT LCD display, 18-bit (262000 Colors), 240 x 320 pixels resolution,

Supported audio formats
AAC, MP3, WMA.

Supported Video Formats
3gp, MPEG-4

2 mega pixel camera, Resolutions
320 x 240, 1280 x 960, 640 x 480, 1600 x 1200

Video Recorder Resolutions
176 x 144 (QCIF), 320 x 240 (QVGA)

Features
Video recording , Self-portrait mirror

Downloadable Content
Games, Ring tones, Wallpapers, Audio files, Video files

Messaging / Data Features
Text messages, Picture messages, E-Mail, Multimedia messages (MMS)

Messaging Services
AOL Instant Messenger Service (AIM), Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger (MSN Messenger)

Phone Book Capacity
1000 names & numbers

Battery
800 mAh

Phone Memory
14 MB, expandable to 4 GB

Razzle Dazzle:

On one side of the phone is a volume rocker and a dedicated camera key and there is microSD card slot and headset/charger jack on the other side. On the back of the phone is camera lens and self-portrait mirror.

Inside Dope:

LG Neon is a semi-touch screen phone where the touch screen interface can be used only for dialing numbers on the phone. If you try touch screen for any other application, it will pretend as if it doesn’t exist at all. We were quite confused as to why the touch screen feature has been put in the phone, if it is to be used for just one feature?
We don’t understand this and you won’t so stop scratching your heads and let’s get along with other features of the phone.

The display of the phone is 2.4 inch long which is quite tiny as compared to the 3.5 inch screen of the Apple’s iPod. The display is sharp, images look great on the phone and the text is legible as well. The resolution is 240 x 320 pixels which is not bad by the standards of 2.4 inch screen. You can change the backlight time, the font size of the menu text and the dialing digits, the brightness, the menu styles, and the appearance of the clock on the home screen. You can also changes wallpapers, display themes, alert tones, etc.

The phone has a touch screen interface but only for dialing. When you press a phone dialer key on the navigation array, a virtual number keypad will come up on the display. This keypad looks quite a lot like iPhone. You can tap numbers on the screen and then press call button. For everything else you will have to use the physical keyboard.

You can set the phone to give haptic feedback, which means the phone will vibrate when it registers a touch. You can also increase or decrease the intensity of the vibration. But we will slam the phone for the touch screen feature rather than appreciate it. Because you don’t get a physical numeric keypad and touch screen gets activated only for numeric keypad. Either we want the touch screen for all applications or we don’t want it at all. LG is serving us a half baked cake.

Below the display there are two soft keys, a four-way toggle with a middle confirmation key, the Send and End/Power keys, the Clear/Back key and the phone dialer key. You can put four short cuts for the four way navigational buttons for your favorite applications. The middle OK button gives you short cut for web browser in standby power.

The phone slides upwards to reveal a very pleasing QWERTY keypad. The buttons are big enough for your fingers and enough space is left between the keys so that there are no mishits. The phone has a built in accelerometer which changes the orientation from portrait to landscape mode when you turn the phone on sides and slide the keypad out. The color on the keyboard is great and goes well with the tone of the phone. The background is yellow and few buttons are highlighted with blue color, which give a very pleasing effect. The QWERTY keypad also has two soft keys on the two sides on the keyboard. The keys are adequately raised above the surface and typing will be easy and comfortable.

The phone has a 1000 entry phone book so you will probably never run out of space for storing contacts. Each entry accepts four numbers, memo, e-mail address and an anniversary reminder. You can click photos of contacts with the given camera and you can pin up the photo to the contact so that it flashes when the contact calls you. Other than this you can also assign individual ring tone to different contacts. There are eight polyphonic ring tones built in or you can use mp3 tracks as ring tones. The Neon has Answer Tones, where your callers will hear a song or a phrase when they call you.

Other basic features include a vibrate mode, speakerphone, text and multimedia messaging, a calendar, an alarm clock, a calculator, a notepad, a world clock, a unit converter, and a stopwatch

You can chat with your friends with included IM clients like Windows Live Messenger, AIM, and Yahoo Messenger. There’s also mobile e-mail, but it is not for all service providers. They include AOL, Yahoo, Windows Live Hotmail, AT&T Yahoo, AIM, Bellsouth, Comcast, Earthlink, Juno, Mindspring, and NetZero. We were disappointed to see that POP or IMAP wasn’t supported. The phone also has application for mobile banking.

The music player on the phone supports supports AAC, AAC+, MP3, and WMA which will let you play all your songs. You can purchase more music through AT&T Mobile Music but it takes long time to download song. Other features in music player include Shazam–a song ID service, MobiVJ, access to XM Radio Mobile and a ringtone maker. It also contains features which most music players on mobile phone has like repeat and shuffle mode and creating and editing playlists. Other than this, there is nothing in the music player that is out of box but you will love the sound quality of the player. You will prefer listening to music with the bundled head phone because the speaker phone is not as good. Bass on the speaker phone is quite poor.

Behind the phone there is a 2 MP camera and we were pleased that the phone has mirror for taking images in self portrait mode. Even high end phones have skipped a mirror on their phones and we miss it bitterly.

The camera is capable of taking four resolutions of 1600×1200, 1280×960, 640×480, 320×240. Other camera settings include 4x zoom, brightness and the choice of three shutter tones, a self-timer plus a silent option. Photo quality is not great and it gets worse in low light conditions maybe because it doesn’t have flash. The camera also lets you record video the two resolutions are 320×240 and 176×144. Video quality too is mediocre.

There is only 14 MB onboard memory on the phone and you will have to get a microSD card for more memory. The phone supports cards up to 4 GB. Just like most phones there is a time limit for MMS clips.

For game enthusiasts there are games like Ms. Pac-Man and Bubble Bash. Don’t expect this phone to take full fledged gamming, the games are provided for leisure or to pass your time while you are waiting for your bus.

The call quality of this phone was quite excellent and we hardly have any complaints. Calls were clear and the other party too gave similar results. We then switched to speaker phone and the quality dropped but this is not unusual since speaker phone attracts lots of background noise. Call quality is inferior in speakerphone as compared to handset calls but you can hear voice clearly.

Nitty Gritty:

To sum up, LG Neon is a simple messaging phone. It is not expensive and provides good features for the price it is offered. But we still don’t understand the touch screen interface only for dialing numbers and nothing else. Neon also should have bundled a microSD card along with the phone since the internal memory is only 14 MB.