| LG VX8100 Expert Reviews |
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LG VX8100 -- by Joni Blecher Follow me on Twitter--July 18th 2006 |
| Full Review |
| If you're tired of the Lilliputian and uber-thin cell phones that litter the landscape, behold the LG VX8100. It's far from small and slender. In fact, it's the exact opposite: large and bulky. Size aside, this LG cell phone does a good job at keeping things simple. It sports Verizon Wireless’ highly intuitive menu system making most tasks two to three buttons away and excels at battery life. Need a cell phone that fills out the palm of a hand, is easy to find and simpler to use? Check out the LG VX8100. |
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| Call Quality |
| Calls and speakerphone: Calls made using the LG VX8100 cell phone are loud; probably related to the two rather large speakers flanking either side of the cell phone’s hinge. Unfortunately, calls aren’t exactly what we would call clear. Occasionally an echo surfaces and there is a definite cut-off during some conversations. We often found the phrase, "Wait, what’d you say?" repeated more than once during calls. Likewise, the speakerphone is loud but also suffers from lack of clarity. Callers were immediately tipped off whenever we used this feature and had a difficult time understanding us during conversations. On the plus side, we typically kept the volume set at medium low and rarely used the side volume keys to make it louder.
Audio playback: We found playback of songs to be quite impressive through the cell phone's speakers. Songs come through loud and clear with little distortion, although they can be slightly tinny and the cell phone lacks audio-centric user controls, so you can't adjust it. |
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| Ease of Use |
Menu/Phonebook: This is one of the more straightforward menu interfaces you'll find on a cell phone. We particularly like how easy it is to use the phonebook. You can store five phone numbers and two e-mail addresses for each contact – sorry, no slots for address info. But if you want to find your phone number you'll need to dig through the menu system. 
Camera/Video: The 1.3-megapixel camera in this LG cell phone is actually pretty good. The flash is bright, which is helpful for snapping pictures at night. Image quality was also good, providing plenty of detail. You can record 15-second videos. We found recorded videos were a bit blurry and accompanied by muffled sounds, but the overall quality was better than that found on other cell phones with this capability. We should mention that occasionally the camera would accidentally get turned on when in a bag, but it rarely took photos in this state. Hey, better that than a contact's phone number being dialed unbeknownst to you.
Music: The LG VX8100 cell phone includes an MP3 player that does a decent job at playing back music. Though this cell phone lacks the ability to adjust audio-centric controls such as bass and treble, it's a snap to use basic playback functions. We particularly like that once the MP3 player is in use (Note: You need to turn the music on from the cell phone's Get Tones and Tunes menu first) you can use the buttons on the face of the LG VX8100 to control the features.
However, unless you're downloading music from Verizon's VCast service getting music onto the cell phone is an entirely different story. You can’t use the Bluetooth to transfer music from a PC to the LG cell phone. However, if you purchase an optional cable and software you’ll be able to transfer WMA (Windows music file format) and MP3 files to the cell phone using Windows Media Player. You can also purchase a MiniSD storage card, store tunes from your PC on that and then slip it into the MiniSD card slot on the side of the cell phone.
Connectivity/Bluetooth: We were able to pair the cell phone with a Motorola Bluetooth H500 headset, however, we needed to consult the manual to set it up correctly. While call quality was perfectly acceptable using a Bluetooth headset there was little else we could do with this feature. For example, we managed to pair the LG cell phone with a PC running Windows XP, but no services on the cell phone were available. This means we couldn't transfer songs, contacts or photos to the LG VX8100 via Bluetooth. |
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| Design |
| Look and Feel: This cell phone is big, even bigger than the Motorola E815. Seriously. It’s also on the slightly heavy side. We never wondered if we had the LG cell phone on hand because it’s easy to locate in a bag with its blue and silver exterior and heavier than the trimmer cell phones we tend to carry. But size does have its advantages and in this case it's the spacious internal and external displays.
Keypad: One good thing about a big cell phone is that it’s likely to have a large keypad – as is the case with the LG VX8100. The blue backlit keys are highly tactile, well spaced out and large enough that one-handed dialing is an easy affair. Our only issue is that we wish the Clear key didn’t do double duty as the one-touch access for the speakerphone. Not that it was an issue really; we just would have preferred a dedicated speakerphone button as is the case with the LG PM-225. |
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| Battery Life |
| If you need a cell phone with stellar battery life, the LG VX8100 fits the bill. We had a hard time draining the battery – even when we left Bluetooth turned on and played music on the cell phone. Heavy cell phone users who make a ton of calls and send/receive loads of text messages daily will need to recharge it every three to four days. More moderate users will be able to make the cell phone last close to a week before needing a charge. If you are a light user, making just two to three 10 minute calls a day and light texting, the LG VX8100 cell phone will last about 10 days. |
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LG VX8100 Expert Rating
