LG Xenon – A messaging phone without POP/IMAP support

Thumbs Up:

LG Xenon offers full QWERTY keyboard, bright touch-screen display, various shortcuts, customizable three standby screens, GPS, 2-megapixel camera, quad-band support, 3G speeds and more.

Thumbs Down:

LG Xenon does not have any support POP3 or IMAP4 email accounts. The touch screen has little learning curve and Web browser is clumsy. Only six widgets are available for Home Screen.

Inside the Trunk:

Technology: WCDMA (UMTS) / GSM
Band: WCDMA (UMTS) / GSM 850/900/1800/1900
Phone Design: Slider
Caller ID: Yes
Other Features: 3G support, quad-band support, 2-megapixel camera and stereo Bluetooth

The Whiz Kid Speaks:

LG Xenon has inbuilt 100MB user-accessible memory and micro-SD card slot for external storage. Supported wireless interface is Bluetooth 2.0. The features set of the Xenon includes TTY compatible, speakerphone, voice recorder, conference call capability, call timer, voice dialing, 10 polyphonic ring-tones, vibrating alert and internal antenna.

2.8 inches touch screen LCD display is based on TFT technology. It has a resolution of 240×400 pixels that supports 16-bit (65000) colors. LG Xenon has 2-megapixel camera. The image storage resolution options are 320×240, 640×480, 1280×960 and 1600×1200. Camcorder can record videos in two resolutions: 176×144 and 320×240. Supported audio formats are WMA, MP3 and AAC.

LG Xenon has 950mAH lithium ion battery that has a life of 240 minutes of talk time and 264 hours of idle standby time.

Razzle Dazzle:

LG Xenon is 4.16 inches tall, 2.11 inches wide and 0.62 inch deep and it weighs around 3.81 ounces. At first look, the Xenon appears to be a touch-screen phone. It has sleek and smooth lines all around. There is chrome touch on its borders. The Xenon is smaller and thicker than LG Vu.

Inside Dope:

Everybody knows that most of the LG mobiles, especially messaging phones, come only in CDMA like LG enV2 for Verizon Wireless and LG Rumor2 for Sprint. For a change, the company’s new phone, LG Xenon, is also available for GSM carrier, AT&T. The Xenon has similar user interface and sliding QWERTY keyboard as LG Vu. On the contrary, Home Screen of LG Xenon can be customized with dedicated pages for applications and contacts, widgets and Annunciator – drop-down menu for shortcuts. The other features of LG Xenon are also similar to the Vu such as stereo Bluetooth, complete HTML browser, music player, 2-megapixel camera and more. LG Xenon costs around $99.99 with two year contract from AT&T. The browsing experience was average, but overall the Xenon performed good in our tests.

2.8 inches touch screen LCD display of LG Xenon has a resolution of 240×400 pixels that supports 262,000 colors. The display is quite smaller than that of LG Vu and LG Dare. However, the display exhibits bright graphics and reproduces good colors. The LCD display shows photo caller ID, signal strength, battery life, and date/time. You can see date/time in overlay screen even when display is locked. You can change the font size, backlight time, color of dial fonts and brightness.

You will notice three icons for standby screens at the top of display. One is for favorite contacts, second is for Home Screen and third is for shortcuts of favorite applications. Each standby screen has four icons at the bottom that corresponds to main menu, messaging menu, contacts list and phone dialer. You will also get four tabs on the right side that includes one for Settings, second for My Stuff, third for Multimedia and fourth for Phone related applications.

The contacts screen will display the name, number and a photo. You can only have three pages for three favorite contacts. The icons can be arranged and aligned to grid. In addition, LG Xenon allows fixing the icons so that they will not change position on screen orientation. You can add maximum nine shortcuts on the shortcuts screen. For adding and removing shortcuts, you have to press and hold down any shortcut icon.

Like TouchWiz interface on Samsung phones, you can customize the home screen with widgets on LG Xenon. There is a right arrow located on the bottom left corner, which can open and close the widget tray. This tray has six widgets: music player, image gallery, sticky notes, calendar, world clock and analog clock. You can simply drag and drop the widgets from the tray to Home Screen.

LG Xenon has Annunciator – drop-down menu for some shortcuts. You can simply tap on the top part of any screen to see a shortcut list. This list can be used to directly access any application like calendar, alarm clock, Windows Live Messenger, AOL Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, voice mail, compose new email, send new SMS, select vibration or ring profile, Bluetooth connection and music player.

The touch screen user interface of LG Xenon is very quick and intuitive. We liked that phone provides the haptic feedback on every touch. You can adjust the responsiveness and accuracy using the Touch Calibration. The user interface has slight learning curve. In other words, new users will need some practice to scroll down and navigate through menu options. The virtual keypad for dialing numbers will appear on pressing the onscreen phone dialer shortcut. This keypad is spacious and easy to use. There is an inbuilt accelerometer to rotate the display on tilting the phone. However, it works only in few applications.

You can slide down LG Xenon on its right side to access four-line full QWERTY physical keyboard. The screen orientation will be changed to landscape on sliding out. The keys are well-spaced, tactile and easy to use. We like the dedicated keys for text messages, mobile email, Web browser, phone book, @ symbol and .com key. Both .com and @ keys are very useful while storing any email address or visiting any website. You can also use the virtual T9 keypad.

Task manager key, End/power button and Call key are located underneath the display. The task manager key allows switching between already open applications. You will find the dedicated camera key, screen lock/hold key and micro-SD card slot on right spine of LG Xenon. Charger jack sits on the top, whereas volume rocker is on the left spine. The camera lens and its LED flash are located on the back. LG Xenon does not have any self-portrait mirror.

LG Xenon can store 500 contacts in its phonebook. Each contact entry can save two numbers, one email address and memo. You can divide the contacts into caller groups and can also pair them with one ring-tone and photo for caller ID.

The basic features of LG Xenon are unit converter, tip calculator, stopwatch, tasks list, world clock, notepad, voice command, voice recorder, calculator, alarm clock, calendar, multimedia and text messaging, speakerphone, vibrate mode and 10 polyphonic ring-tones.

The advanced features of LG Xenon include A-GPS, mobile email, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, AIM Messenger and stereo Bluetooth. Mobile e-mail supports Web based email accounts of NetZero, Mindspring, Juno, Earthlink, Comcast, BellSouth, AT&T Yahoo, Windows Live Mail, AIM, AOL and Yahoo. We disappointed that the Xenon does not support POP3 accounts. For A-GPS, the phone comes with AT&T Navigator.

LG Xenon has Media Net browser – a full HTML Web browser like other touch-screen phones. It features multi-tab browsing, turn off images, switching between pop-up windows and adjusting font-size. The Xenon’s browser appeared to be clumsier while testing. It did not load CSS (Cascade Style Sheets) completely and the pages were looking strange. You can zoom in and out using magnify glass icon, but it has some delay in its functioning. Also, you cannot scroll completely due to small display. However, the arrows on keyboard make it easy.

AT&T has also included its services like AT&T Cellular Video for streaming video content from CBS and CNN, AT&T Video share for watching videos via other compatible phone and AT&T Mobile Music to download music through Napster.

AT&T Mobile Music also offers XM Radio Mobile, MobiVJ, ring-tone maker, music fan community, song ID service, Music ID and streaming service for satellite radio. It also has an inbuilt music player that features creation/editing of play-lists, shuffle and repeat modes. The music player supports WMA, AAC+, AAC and MP3 audio formats. You can download the songs through Napster and transfer from USB cable also. The music and photos can be stored to internal memory and on SD card also.

LG Xenon has 2-megapixel that features video recording and still capture. You can capture still images using five white balance presets, five color effects, three quality settings and four resolutions. Its settings are three shutter tones with one silent option, flash toggle, brightness, timer and night mode. The photo quality is good. The images looked tack sharp and colors looked mute. You can record videos in three modes: Video Share (for video calling), MMS (shorter clip) and General mode (longer videos).

LG Xenon can be personalized with selection of alert tones, calendar and clock formats, color schemes, wallpaper, and more. The Xenon also has some applications like My Cast Weather, Mobile Banking and Mobi TV. It also has games including Monopoly Here & How, I-play Bowling, Diner Dash and Bubble Bash. More options, games, and applications can be downloaded from Media Net store.

We made few calls through quad-band based LG Xenon via AT&T service. The overall call quality was average. We received little echo and static at our end, which increased more on speakerphone. The callers received robotic sound at their end without any background noise or static. However, they could tell that we were calling through a cell phone.

The speakerphone call quality was also average. The callers received good sound volume with some echo effect at their end. We received little hollow sound at our end. The situation was same on playing music as the audio was sounding hollow and tinny. We will recommend you to use stereo headset for better music quality.

We will prefer AT&T to improve the 3G speeds. The Microsoft Web site completely loaded in 1 minute 20 seconds. The streaming video at AT&T Cellular Video took 40 seconds to buffer before playing, but there was no other buffer after playback. The video quality was pixilated due to small screen size. We thought that there was some problem at AT&T’s end because we got same problem on some other phones.

LG Xenon has battery life of 11 days of idle standby time and four hours of talk time. The digital SAR rating of the Xenon is 0.686 watt per kg as per FCC radiation tests.

Nitty Gritty:

LG Xenon is one of the best messaging phones, which we had seen till now. It offers various features and good touch-screen user interface. If you need a touch-screen phone with messaging features and can manage without POP/IMAP accounts, then you can buy this new LG Xenon. However, we will recommend you to check other messaging or smartphones in its class before making any decision.