After a month of furiously shopping gifts for your friends and family, you might want to get a small gift to yourself, a cellphone on the budget. Hi-Mobile sent us in for a review two extremely affordable cellphones that don't lack features. The first one is the popular Motorola SLVR L7 (just $140) and the other one is the less popular --but with 3G and web capabilities-- LG U8500 (aka U880, just $180).The LG U8500 is a 3G phone (2100 Mhz, European band), and it's pretty amazing having such a modern phone for less than two hundred bucks. It also has triband GSM and Bluetooth, but it's lacking 850 Mhz and EDGE support. It features a very bright high-quality 176x220 TFT internal screen, and a secondary 96x96 external screen that has some small angle-viewing problems The handset supports vibration and has a dual stereo speaker system. It also sports a microSD hot-swap slot, while it already has a spacious 75 MBs of free internal storage. GPRS worked as expected, we managed to transfer data at about 3 KB/sec (which is normal for GPRS). The handset also sports a 1.3 MP camera without flash or mirror. You can rotate the camera to make it function as a front-video call camera. You can also shoot videos of yourself this way. The box included two Li-Ion 1050 mAh batteries, the handset, some manuals and CDs, a stereo headset, a USB cable, a wrist wrap and a charger.
The handset is a clamshell, it has volume keys and the headset connection on the left side, and the microSD, a "shortcut" button (opens a toolbar in the screen with shortcut icons to 8 functions) and the usb/charger jack on the right side. In the interrior view of the clamshell you will find all the normal buttons you would expect to, plus shortcut buttons for the Calendar, Music Player and Camera. On the back of the phone, under the rotating camera, there is a small hole for the wrist wrap and a battery-release button. Under the external screen you will find 3 buttons that don't do anything under normal operation, but when your music player is ON they function as 'previous song' on normal press and rewind on long press, play/stop and fast forward/next song. When the phone is on standby and you keep pressing the play/stop button for more than 3 seconds, the media player will load. This effectively makes the phone a pretty usable mp3 player. Apparently, you can't use these buttons below the external screen to accept/reject calls (you must flip the phone open to do so), but at least you can see the number that is calling you and decide if you want to take the call or not.
This phone uses the Teleca Obigo framework and lots of its UI was written using that framework (one interesting UI characteristic is that when you need to input text you just select the input box and you do so directly, you are not driven to a separate screen to type like all other phones do). In the handset you will find all the normal applications that you would expect to find: a Calendar, Alarms, Todo, Java MIDP-2, email, MMS, memo voice recorder, calculator and more. There is vibration support and a profile editor too, but there is no flight mode support.
I much liked the Contacts application, which is very straight forward when you add new contacts. You can select between images from your handset, an avatar or directly snapping a picture of the person you are trying to enter as your contact. Overall, the UI is very nice throughout the phone, but it is obvious that it is not fully polished (e.g. the Contact's image stretches in an ugly way when clicking on it, "Marking" files in the file manager is not fast-enough, getting to your music or video or java files you have to click one extra time instead of these files being shown in the root of each of these folders etc). Nevertheless, the UI is spiffy fast. Fast was also the Bluetooth data exchange which topped at about 30 KB/sec.
The music application is pretty basic (no playlists, no sorting by artists/albums), but you know, if you just want to listen to some music while waiting your bus or train, the phone will do just fine. The included headset and the phone's audio chipset produce very good quality sound. One thing I didn't like is that the headset/charge/usb jacks are not the same as the ones found in the LG Chocolate phone (LG seems to have 3-4 different standards for their jacks, depending which unit manufactures the phone). The music application has EQ support and two visualization plugins. It can playback mp3, AAC. WMA is also supported, but not by the music player. If you click on a WMA file on the file manager it will play fine, but it can't be copied in the Music library for some strange reason...
The 1.3 MP camera is not the best in the market, but it will do its job. It has support for some effects, delay timer, various resolutions, night mode. I particularly found very cool to be able to shoot myself making faces and then send funny videos to my husband (under the pretence that I am "testing the device" ;-). The phone shoots 3GP at 176x144 and 128x96 (at 15fps, video sample), but it can playback MP4 video too. I loved how it can go landscape when it's playing videos without dropping frames or having any sort of delays.
The battery life is not too great, you will get just a standard performance out of it. I found that you will need to recharge your phone every 2-3 days if you are using it occassionally (and I even had UMTS turned off in order to save battery life). However, the phone comes with two batteries, so I think you get enough for what you pay. One thing I can't forgive though is the pretty bad reception its antenna has. There are times that I would lose the signal completely. The good news is that voice quality is acceptable.
One thing I really liked is the web browser though. The phone runs the latest version of Obigo, a browser that competes in the low-end market with its ability to offer a lot of standards support for very little RAM (the browser can render small-ish HTML pages, like OSNews', even in 512 KBs of RAM). I liked the UI of Obigo, and the way it actually renders pages. The font used was nice too. What I didn't like though was the bug that I found in it: when a JAD file is clicked in a web link, it will fail to download the JAR file and install the Java application requested. In order to download Opera Mini and the GMail client I had to write my own webpage that linked to the JARs directly (not to the JADs), upload the page in my web space and then install it via the web browser. I can't understand how Teleca or LG didn't find this bug during testing! Even more disappointing was the fact that if you copy via USB or Bluetooth a JAD or a JAR file, the system fails to install these files! I mean, really, if you don't have an unlimited data GPRS account, forget installing Java apps easily in the phone via Bluetooth or USB.
Overall though, this is a great phone if you consider the little money that it costs comparatively. Especially if you are living in western Europe where you can make use of UMTS 2100Mhz most of the time (in my own country, Greece, only few selected cities have 3G support as of yet), this is the phone for you.
Pros:
Handy music buttons on the outside
Super affordable for its features
3G UMTS with video telephony
75 MBs of internal storage
Good web browser
MicroSD cardslot
Cons:
Won't install JAR/JAD files that were copied via BT/USB
Bug when downloading Java apps via JAD web link
Not Quad-band, no EDGE
No camera flashlight
Very poor reception
No QVGA screen
No flight mode
Rating: 8.0/10
- "LG U8500 review"
- "MOT-L7 SLVR review"
