Shane Conder's Whateveritis of Nothing

When opening the package, the first thing that I noticed about the phone was that it was light and felt good in my hand.  It wasn't too thick or too thin, although it's barely thicker than a Motorola RAZR. It is a normal flip-phone with a standard screen resolution and a relatively normal keypad.  On the outside, it has touch-sensitive buttons for media playback.  The camera is the ubiquitous 1.3 MP variety with no optical zoom or automatic focus. 

My delight with the phone, though, comes with a number of software improvements that I haven't seen on any other Sprint phone and have barely seen on any phone at all.  One of the first things one would notice about the phone is that it has an idle screen with functionality.  These are handled through themes (which, from what I can tell, are based on QUALCOMM's uiOne functionality) that do more than just change the wallpaper.  In one included theme, there is a "hover" effect for some of the "On Demand" data such as a news ticker that scrolls and the weather for where you are (once you set the zip code).  Another "hover" effect will show you how many emails you have and a small part of the email from two of your email providers you've configured.  More themes can be purchased, at a typical cost of $4-5 each.  Not all themes are created equal.  They can look and feel different with different levels of functionality.  Some don't do the hover over effects, some are geared around a bundle of wallpaper.  Most have some sort of theme such as sports or beach pictures.  My favorite is the included one that is the "Sprint Messaging" one.  I'd like to see one with that functionality plus links to the TV one with the ability to show what's on a couple of stations.

This change leads one to find a couple more of the improvements right away.  First is the included email account that provides support for AOL Mail, AIM Mail, Hotmail, Yahoo!, Gmail, PCS Mail, IMAP, and POP.  A number of accounts can be configured; I have three (Gmail, Hotmail, and POP). All can be setup up for "push" notifications, which seems to mean the service side checks your email and sends a special SMS message to the phone saying that there are new emails -- the client supports this and checks for them.  For Gmail and Hotmail, the read status and the deleted status are synced back up to the webmail service, but folders and tags are not supported. POP mail functions as expected and does  not remove email from the server.  The service is quite fast at notifying of new emails.  It's not Blackberry, but it's certainly nice to have built-in to the phone (and at no additional cost for most people).

The other change is a new "On Demand" service that has an improved UI, can do updates automatically (although I can't find how to configure how frequently), and seems to provide even faster access to news, stocks, movie times, and weather.  The UI is no iPhone UI for these, but it does work fairly well and the integration with the themes is nice.

The next change that I noticed is that the Sprint TV application (which includes streaming radio) has a completely new UI that looks much nicer, is much faster, and is much easier to use.  It has more of a standard electronic program guide to choose what you want to watch that shows what is currently playing now and for what seems to be an unlimited amount of time in to the future, although you'll quickly lose track of what date you're looking at.  The quality seems to be improved, but that may just be my imagination.  There is no direct support for YouTube, but the mobile site works fine and plays the videos with little fuss, even in full screen format (playback switches to the built-in media player, which has an image enhancer that ... does something).

Most other pieces of the standard Sprint software haven't changed much, although I didn't see the Sprint movie application preloaded (which is no big loss, but I did later find it for free download). Sprint's Power View application is still present in the application section, although it might be better to integrate some of that functionality.  Unlike the UpStage, this handset already has a good set of shipping applications.  Although the Ambassador program promised that the UpStage would have all of the applications, it appears that Sprint just couldn't convince developers of this since applications could not be used that weren't designed for it. 

One new feature of the handset is that it has a built-in FM transmitter for transmitting audio to a radio, such as one in your car.  Apparently, though, this will only work with the music player.  The music player is, sadly, the same old music player and store they've been using for quite some time.  This means that I still get frequent errors trying to buy music.  Playback works fine and the FM transmitter works pretty well.  In my Honda Accord, there was just a little bit of static if it was in my pocket and virtually no static if I put the phone in the middle of the back seats (which is just below the antennas).  Since it only works with the music player, though, this means you won't be able to use it for Sprint TV and Radio or such applications as Pandora (which is already available for this phone).  You'll have to go back to the auxiliary jack for this.

On the plus side, like the UpStage, this phone comes with a hands-free microphone adapter that has a standard stereo 3.5mm jack.  You can use whatever headphones you want or use it as a line-out.  On the downside, you have to provide headphones or an earpiece as none are included.  However, this LG is still using a standard 2.5mm headset jack, so the included adapter is not required, unlike many other new phones, including the UpStage.

Overall, I've been quite surprised by this phone and that comes in light of the fact that I've been messing around with Apple's iPhone at work a bunch (our group has one for research purposes).  This is a normal, light phone with average battery life and a lot of really nice features with a reasonable UI.  On the downside, it's crashed a number of times, usually when doing some sort of download. I'll be checking for firmware upgrades via the on-phone feature.