There’s nothing like choice. Just ask AT&T who released two very similar side-sliding QWERTY touch screen phones in the same week: the LG Xenon and the Samsung Impression. Much like the dynamic duo of touch screen slab phones, the LG Vu and Samsung Eternity on AT&T, LG takes the lower road while Samsung the higher road in terms of price, features and casing. The Xenon, released in April 2009 for $99 with contract after rebates, is half the price of the Samsung Impression, and it has a smaller and less fancy display as well as a lower resolution camera. At 4.1 x 2.1 x 0.6 inches and 3.8 ounces, the LG is one of the more pocketable side-sliding QWERTY phones and it’s much smaller than the Impression. And better yet, it’s not just a warmed over LG Vu: the touch UI has evolved in good ways and there are several new features like widgets that we’ve seen on LG’s more recent touch screen phones for Verizon.
Design
At first glance, the LG Xenon appears to be just another touch-screen phone. Measuring 4.16 inches long by 2.11 inches wide by 0.62 inch thick, the Xenon has smooth, sleek lines all around, with a touch of chrome around the border. It’s a little smaller than the LG Vu and a little thicker as well. The Xenon is fairly lightweight at 3.81 ounces, and it’s slim enough to fit in a front pocket. Dominating its entire front surface is a large 2.8-inch touch-screen display. It’s smaller than the 3-inch displays on the LG Dare and the LG Vu, but it still looks good. It supports 262,000 colors and 240×400 pixels, which result in great-looking graphics and colorful images. You can view the date, time, battery life, signal strength, and photo caller ID. Even when the screen is locked, you can see the date and time in a screen overlay. You can set the brightness, the backlight timer, and the font size. For dialing fonts, you can set the color as well.
Along the top of the screen are three icons, each of which corresponds to one of three customizable standby screens. You get one just for your favorite contacts, one for the home screen, and one for your favorite application shortcuts. All standby screens have four shortcut icons along the bottom, which correspond to the phone dialer, the contacts list, the messaging menu, and the main menu. The main menu interface is similar to the one on the Vu, with four tabs along the right to differentiate applications. You get one tab for Phone-related apps, one for Multimedia, one for My Stuff (which includes the media gallery plus productivity tools), and another for Settings.
For the favorite contacts screen, just follow the instructions to add a contact from your phone book. The contacts will then appear as small icons with the person’s name, phone number, and photo. You can have up to three pages of favorite contacts, and you can arrange them on the screen however you wish by dragging and dropping the icons, or you can align them with the grid. You can also fix the icons so they don’t change position with the screen orientation. As for the shortcuts screen, you can add up to nine shortcuts. To add and remove shortcuts, simply press and hold down on a shortcut icon.
The home screen is also customizable with a variety of widgets, similar to the TouchWiz interface on some Samsung phones. On the bottom left of the Xenon’s home screen is a little right arrow that opens up to reveal a tray of widgets. There are only six to choose from, though; there’s an analog clock, a world clock, the calendar, sticky notes, the image gallery, and the music player. To add a widget to the home screen, just drag and drop it on the page. You can then close the tray by pressing the little left arrow.
The LG Xenon also has a drop-down shortcuts menu it calls the “Annunciator.” Simply tap the top part of any screen, and a list of shortcuts will appear. You can go directly to the music player, toggle the Bluetooth connection on and off, set your ring and vibration profile, send a new text message, send a new mobile e-mail, check your voice mail, start the instant messenger for either Yahoo, AOL, or Windows Live, set your alarm clock, or view the calendar.
As with all touch-screen handsets, you use only your fingers (or a stylus if you have one) to navigate the interface. It felt quite intuitive, and we liked that there was haptic feedback to let us know when our touch has registered. There’s also Touch Calibration to ensure proper accuracy and responsiveness. Do note there’s a slight learning curve involved. When we first started using it, we occasionally had issues when scrolling through lists–sometimes we would accidentally select something by mistake. We did learn to deal with this eventually, though. Dialing numbers went pretty smoothly, because of the large numbers on the virtual keypad. There’s also a built-in internal accelerometer, but it only works with certain applications, like the Web browser–it would turn the screen orientation from portrait to landscape mode when tilted 90 degrees, for example.
Keyboard
he LG Xenon GR500 is a lightweight slider phone aimed at the texting generation. Unlike many sliders with a QWERTY keyboard, the Xenon is a full-blown touch-screen phone. It’s styled to look like a bulky RAZR imitator, complete with a small “chin” at the bottom. The Xenon also offers plenty of music, video, and Web browsing power. At $99 with a two-year contract and mail-in rebate, it’s tough to fault this handset for anyone looking for a compact messaging device. In turn, it’s our new Editors’ Choice for a feature phone on AT&T.
The Xenon is especially small for a horizontal slider. It weighs 3.8 ounces and measures 4.2 by 2.1 by 0.6 (HWD) inches. My test handset was finished in red (really more of a magenta) plastic with a chrome accent band around the sides. Blue and black versions are also available. The slide-out QWERTY keyboard felt cramped for what should have been a roomy horizontal layout. Part of that was due to the small keys, and part was due to symbol and function keys bracketing the letters on both sides. With a little practice, though, I could type fairly quickly, and the keys offered just the right amount of tactile feedback.
Battery
The Xenon has a 950 mAh Lithium Ion battery that’s user replaceable. For a 3G handset, the Xenon has good battery life and lasted us 2 days on a charge with light to moderate use. Using the GPS for trip navigation and streaming CV hit the battery the hardest, while music playback uses very little power when the screen is off. Claimed talk time is 4 hours and that was on target in our tests.
Features
The LG Xenon has a rather skimpy 500-entry phone book, with room in each entry for two phone numbers, an e-mail address, and a memo. You can assign contacts to caller groups, have a photo for caller ID, and one of 10 polyphonic ringtones or one of 10 message alert tones. Basic features include a vibrate mode, a speakerphone, text and multimedia messaging, a calendar, an alarm clock, a calculator, a voice recorder, voice command, a notepad, a world clock, a tasks list, a stopwatch, a tip calculator, and a unit converter.
More advanced users will like the stereo Bluetooth, instant messaging (with AIM, Yahoo, and Windows Live accounts), mobile e-mail, and A-GPS. The mobile e-mail is housed within a Web-based interface and will only support e-mail from certain accounts like Yahoo, AOL, AIM, Windows Live Hotmail, AT&T Yahoo, BellSouth, Comcast, Earthlink, Juno, Mindspring, and NetZero. We weren’t able to use Gmail, especially since the Xenon doesn’t support POP or IMAP. As for A-GPS, the Xenon comes with AT&T Navigator, AT&T’s turn-by-turn location-based service.
As with most touch-screen phones, we expect there to be a full HTML browser to make use of the larger screen real estate, and on that point, we’re not disappointed. We also like that you can open up multiple browser windows, which act like tabbed browsing. Like on a regular browser, you can change the font size, toggle pop-up windows, turn off images, and more. However, the Media Net browser on the Xenon proved to be clunkier than we would like. Even though it renders most pages just fine, it sometimes won’t load CSS designs properly and the page would look a little strange. You have to zoom in and out of pages using the little magnifying glass icon, which can be a bit tedious after a while, as there was often a lag. Also, because the screen is so small, you’ll have to scroll a lot more through pages. Thankfully, the arrows on the QWERTY keyboard make this easier.
Despite those minor gaffes, the Xenon is a stellar choice overall and our Editors’ Choice for a feature phone on AT&T. However, there’s plenty of competition among other categories in AT&T’s lineup. The iPhone 3G is an obvious shoo-in due to its touchscreen design and identical $99 up-front price, but it requires a more expensive data plan than the Xenon and lacks a hardware QWERTY keyboard. It’s superior in almost every other aspect, though. The $79 Nokia Surge is another smartphone-style option. It rings in at a slightly lower up-front price but costs $15 more per month, though it offers document editing and Exchange support while keeping the slide-out horizontal keyboard. Finally, camera buffs that don’t need QWERTY should head straight for the $179 Sony Ericsson C905a, with its excellent 8.1-megapixel camera and full array of Cyber-shot features. Visit us for more Cell phone news and Cell phone review.
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