LG Prada Review - Conclusion
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Alfredo Padilla Published on June 25, 2007 Comment on this |
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Who's It For
Business User
The LG Prada is not a good choice for business users that need a reliable email client and integration with business servers like BlackBerry and Exchange. Although the presence of document viewers on the Prada may make some business users smile, our inability to view attachments to email, and the 300kb limit in general makes it a poor choice for those who live and die via email.
Budget Callers
$799, that's all we have to say here, next.
Chatty Teenager
The Prada may make some chatty teenagers smile, with it's good looks and Prada branding. The camera is solid, talk time good and the interface is relatively easy to use. We even managed a decent words per minute score for those who like to text all day. Any teenager that can talk Mom and/or Dad into shelling out the bucks for one gets props from us.
Media Maven
The Prada may be a good choice for Media Mavens. With expandable storage, a good camera and decent video and music playback capabilities there's a lot to like here. Media Mavens will especially like the large 3 inch screen with 400 x 240 resolution. What they won't like is the dearth of support for various media types. You better make sure that all your music is in MP3 format or you won't be able to play it on the Prada. The lack of support for H264 encoded video is also a downer. Still, you could do a lot worse for a media phone.
Conclusion
The LG Prada phone has been put into an interesting situation due to circumstances beyond it's control. As one of the few current phones out there that relies on a touch screen interface it will inevitably be compared to Apple's upcoming iPhone. We feel that this is an unfair comparison for a number of reasons. First of all the iPhone purports to be a "smart" phone, with Apple inviting comparisons to devices like Treo's and Blackberries. The Prada on the other hand is not a smart phone; the poor support for email and limited organizer features should make it clear that this is a feature phone.
What the Prada is, however, is a fashion phone that packs more functionality under the hood than we would have expected. In particular the touch screen interface works a lot better than we thought it would. The interface has been designed to be used with a fingertip, so buttons are much larger and easier to "touch" than those found on Windows Mobile Professional devices. The on screen keypad functioned fairly well, we were able to type 33.8 words per minute on it, although of course you will need to be looking at it all the time due to the lack of tactile feedback. The Prada is proof that not all touch screen interfaces are automatically frustrating and poorly designed, which should be heartening to potential iPhone buyers.
One thing that people are expecting from their phones nowadays, especially the ones that cost $799, is the ability to be a multimedia device. In this area the Prada does fairly well. The camera put up good scores in our testing, with the only major issue being that the auto-focus is slow. In terms of music and video playback, we were pleased with the functionality of the software, but not so much at the limited formats supported. The music player will only handle MP3's, while the video player won't be able to handle popular formats like windows media and H264 encoded video.
When it comes right down to it the Prada is a niche product. Those who purchase it will probably do so based on the prestige of having a Prada branded phone, rather than the functionality. Still, I'm sure they'll be pleased to know that they'll be getting a solid phone in addition to making a fashion statement.
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