LG first android phone for the US. Does the LG Ally really become your mobile ally on the road? Read the review to find out.
LG has provided this LG Ally to experience the product to give our independent review
Hardware
The LG Ally is a slider phone with a full QWERTY keyboard. The outside build of the phone is mostly plastic and while feels solid it definitely doesn’t give you the feeling of a premium phone. The front of the phone has a 3.2 inch screen with a 480 x 800 pixel resolution with two touch sensitive buttons on the bottom for back and search and physical buttons for send, end, home and menu and on top you have a 3.5 mm headphone jack. The sides have your volume rocker and dedicated camera key and microSD card slot which supports up to 32GB of storage. On the back of the phone you have 3.2 megapixel camera with LED flash. When you slide the phone out you reveal a full QWERTY keyboard that has an interesting feel to it. While the keys are spaced out using the keyboard is awkward and can be clumsy at first. Over time you can become used to it but at first the keyboard looks familiar but works very foreign at first.
Inside we have at 600 MHZ ARM 11 processor which by today’ standards is decent and in the mid to low end of speed. The battery is a 1500 mAH battery what will give you a report talk time of about 7.5 hours and 500 hours of standby however in real testing I would get about a day to a day and a half before needing to charge. Heavy data users will get a day max out of it. For internal memory you get 128 MB of memory inside for storage, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi wireless n, speakerphone, 3G speeds via EV-DO from Verizon and Android 2.1 for software to round of the features. A good feature set for a mid-range phone.
Software & Usability
Inside you have your standard Android 2.1 with an option to use the regular home screen or use LG’s custom home screen. The LG screen provide the standard app drawer versus the 3D app drawer and shortcuts on the bar to the most comment apps. There is also improvements to the dialer app that makes the buttons more finger friendly and give it a much better look than stock. LG also include their own custom widgets to use which are functional but can be a pain to get to as they are not separate from stock android widgets. For social networking gurus the Socialite app allows you to add your Facebook and Twitter feeds in one app and be able to check and update your status in each of them. You get the same functionality as in the separate apps but now you can do it all from one location. Refreshing is a bit slower that the separate apps for each but the app is convenient to get everything done in one place.
The camera is also enhanced to be easier to use as its much improved over the stock version of the camera app. Camera quality is actually pretty decent for a 3.2 megapixel camera with 640 x 480 resolution for video recording. Audio on the video is not the best but picture and video quality is on par with most mid range phones.
Making phone calls is great and the sound quality is on par for what you would expect from most of Verizon’s phones. Reception comes in full and clear and didn’t drop any calls. Typing on the phone as stated before when talking about the keyboard can be a very clumsy process at first and will take some time to get used to. The feedback from the keys is just not what you would want it to be and the keys are not as raised as you would think they would be when looking at it.
Overall
The LG Ally is a good first entry for android based phones for LG. The hardware is good for the price range this phone is selling at but if you have been looking at the large selection of premium android phones for Verizon it will make the Ally seem as its missing something. For those looking for a good phone at a low price the LG Ally is the way to go and is probably the best in its classes of mid-range android phones.
About Bowman
Pingback: LG Optimus T Review — BWOne.com