LG Prada Review - Intro
|
Alfredo Padilla Published on June 25, 2007 Comment on this |
|
|
|
|
The LG Prada is one of a growing category of fashion phones. These phones focus on style rather then features. And we have to admit that even to our fashion-impaired eyes the Prada looked good, with sleek black lines and silver highlights. We also found that it packed some surprising functionality. Although not a smart phone, it's unique touch screen interface was intuitive and easy to use, much more so than the busier interfaces found on Windows Mobile Professional devices that have touch screens. The Prada is a tri-band GSM phone, which means that it may have some trouble in areas of North America as it ldoesn't support the 850 Mhz GSM band that is used here, especially outside of urban areas. It is not being subsidized by any carrier so you will need to purchase it from an importer. Our review phone was provided by Dynamism.com, who offer the LG Prada for $799. On the plus side was the Prada's 2 megapixel camera, which performed well in most of our tests. We did find that the auto-focus was slow, so don't expect to take action shots with it. Multimedia support was solid, although the limited number of file types supported for both video and audio limits what you can watch and listen to. Where the Prada falls down is in terms of email and organizer support. The email support especially is sub par, with messages limited to 300 kilobits in size. We also found it impossible to view incoming attachments, even though we know the phone supports viewing of various file types. We must emphasize though that this is not a smart phone, even though the price is similar to some higher end smart phones; if you want to view and edit documents on the road, go for a Blackberry like the 8800.
For regular SMS and MMS messaging though the Prada does better. We found the on screen keypad to be much more usable than we expected; we were able to type 33.8 words per minute on it, although it does take some getting used to. We also enjoyed the games that came with the Prada, which made good use of the touch screen interface. We wish that more software makers would take a hint and realize that you don't have to somehow approximate physical controls when you're dealing with a touch screen interface. I'm looking at you, Microsoft.
| Next | |
|
|
|