The Cynic Says……

Well, I ended up having to get a new phone because my old one got run over. I was loading my bike onto the bus (they have bus racks on the front) and apparently it fell off my hip where I was carrying it. I didn’t notice it until the bus had moved forward and apparently already run it over. Here’s what it looks like now. I didn’t have insurance on the phone, so it couldn’t be replaced for anything less than full price ($600). I needed a new phone immediately and didn’t want to wait and order one off ebay or anything of that nature. So I went to the sprint store and bought a new LG PM-325. It’s a neat little slider-type phone with a really nice screen and bluetooth. Here’s my little mini-review

So far I’ve been impressed with it for the most part in my 2 days of usage. The earpiece is fairly loud and very clear. The ringers are as loud as any phone in recent memory and they don’t distort even at max volume. Also, you can actually feel the vibrating ringer when it’s in your pocket! Reception is every bit as good as my Treo, if not better. I managed to get slightly better signal in my friend’s basement where most phones cut out or get jack shit for signal. Surpsing since the phone actually has an internal antenna. Like all new Sprint phones, it has true SMS which makes sending and receiving text messages easier and more reliable. Bluetooth, however, was the main reason I bought the phone. As of yet, I haven’t gotten my hands on a bluetooth headset to test it but I did get to pair it with a Logitech Bluetooth hub over at my friend’s house and it paired just fine. We even managed to take a cal and have it use the computer speakers as a speakerphone of sorts. Kinda neat, but rather useless if you ask me. For whatever reason, you can’t transfer files to and from the phone via Bluetooth. I guess if they enabled that, you wouldn’t have any incentive to use Sprint’s download service that charges you per download. The screen is decent sized and very bright. Even though it’s an STN instead of TFT, you’d never know it unless you read it somewhere or someone told you. The phone does have a VGA camera, but quality is nothing to drool over. Even at its highest quality settings, it’s overly compressed and pictures come out rather blurry with artifacting evident. Obviously it’d be fine for a quick pic if you didn’t have time to whip out the digicam, but certainly no substitute for it. The keypad backlight is a soft purple glow that makes the keys pretty easy to read in almost any lighting condition. It does have voice dialing, which is activated by a button on the left side of the phone just above the volume keys. The great thing about it is that you can just hit the button and say the name with the slider closed. Unlike the Kyocera slider, the phone can be operated in the open or closed position. Other intersting touches I’ve found… There’s one button each to the left and to the right of the navigation keypad right under the screen. The right one has a red light in its top section, the left one has a green light. When you plug the phone in to charge, the red one lights up and when it’s done charging, the green one lights up. A neat little touch if you ask me. You can also customize what each direction on the 4-way navigation pad does when you press it from the standby screen. The center/OK button always brings up the camera app, however.

Now that I’ve gotten all the good stuff out of the way, here’s my nitpicks about the phone. When you get a text msg, voicemail, etc. it only notifies you once and flashes the green light at you a couple of times. There’s no further reminder that you have text or VM waiting unless you slide the phone open and look at the screen. In my opinion, a phone should have some sort of flashing LED or reminder every x minutes that you have a message waiting. Also, the phone has speakerphone but it’s only one-way. It’s called a “monitor” because you can hear the other person but not talk to them as the microphone is not active when you activate the speakerphone. Lame lame lame lame! Granted, I use a headset more often than not so a speakerphone isn’t a huge concern for me. However, some people do use speakerphone fairly often so this may be an issue. It also rather irks me that the file transfer feature of bluetooth has been disabled. This means if I want to load my own ringtones onto the phone I have to use one of the various vision file uploaders on the web. While they work, they’re nowhere near as nice as being able to just pair phone and computer and transfer the files that way. I’ll get over it, though. The one thing so far that kinda worries me is the fact that vision speeds are just insanely slow. 50kbps seems to be about the best I can muster in any case. When I get a bluetooth PDA, it would most certainly be nice to pair the two and surf faster than 50kbps. Other people on howardforums.com seem to be reporting the same problems. Too bad it’s only one of two Sprint phones with bluetooth on the market right now, the other one being the Sony-Ericsson T608. Sprint does also have two PDA phones that have bluetooth but they’re out of the price range of 90% of their userbase. The PalmOne Treo650 is a $600 phone and the PPC 6601 is a $650 phone. Granted both can be had for much less when signing a new 2 year agreement, but they’re both well over $400. I still won’t be trading it in anytime soon, though. My nitpicks are minor and its upsides far outweigh its downsides… For new customers, the phone runs $79.99 though they’re running an online web special @ $49.99. In my opinion, that’s an absolute steal for such a good phone. Existing customers pay $229.99 + taxes. Mine came out to just over $250.00.

Overall, I’d give the phone a solid 7.5 out of 10. It’s not perfect and it could use a few more features here and there but given the price, I’m not complaining one bit.

• Pros:
• reception
• loud ringers
• great vibrator :p
• nice screen
• user interface
• phone can be used whether open or closed
• voice dialling
• bluetooth
• compact size/light weight
• sound quality
• price

• Cons:
• no BT file transfers
• still VGA camera, and not so hot quality at that, no flash
• no SD/MMC/transflash expansion slot
• SLOWWWW Vision speeds
• only 1MB storage on phone
• 1-way speakerphone
• no message reminder for vm, text, IM, etc