Shorties unofficial review of the LG Quantum

[shortylickens]

I will try my best to be as non-inflamatory as possible. To that end I will not make direct comparisons to other platforms but instead be as specific as possible on this one platform.


HARDWARE:

- Nice solid body but not too heavy. Soft touch rubber/plastic all around, which I really like. Curved but not ball shaped.
- Menu button is big and easy to find. Other buttons are small or flush and not easy to hit, but maybe thats a good thing. Holding down the power button merely shuts it off, does not access airplane mode or themes or anything. Holding down the menu button only brings up the voice functions, not editable so far as I can tell.
- Loudspeaker is weak and crummy. Earpiece is weak and crummy. Other people tell me my voice sounds muffled.
- No SD slot that I can find. Camera is mediocre but I prefer my SLR anyway. It does have a strong flash, but with poor color it doesnt matter.
- Screen is bright and clear with good auto and manual brightness. Just as good if not better than my Droid (which is still the standard by which new phones are judged.)
- Touchscreen is sensitive but not tricky.
- Keyboard is easy to use with quick access to special characters and such. But I dont think I'd wanna type long emails or documents on it.

SOFTWARE:
- OS is sleek looking. Not too busy or colorful or fancy which I actually prefer. Desktop makes it easy to find anything and quickly access important stuff. The tiles may be restricting but that could actually be good once I get used to it. Very few things need multiple tiles. They dont have widgets, just live tiles. The weather channel tile is nice and neat.
- UI is very smooth, I dont know if thats the powerful hardware or efficient OS. I'd need other phones side by side to be sure.
- Digging in settings and changing them is super easy, especially for the color themes and email accounts. No fancy overly-animated stuff or busy colors, which I kinda like.
- It has a calendar which so far as I can see only syncs to gmail and yahoo accounts, not hotmail. Email work is simple and clean, easy to use for me. Contacts are all consolidated like in the other popular platforms. You can click on one contact and work with them by any means including IM, email, Facebook and more. You can even keep your favorite contact tiles on the desktop if you like.
- Xbox live is neat with some fun games, easy to navigate. BUT, you cant keep shortcuts to those games on the desktop, unless I am missing something. Games acquired through the regular app market can be stickied.
- They have an LG, AT&T and microsoft app market. All are easy to navigate, sort, and download. Smooth operation and multiple things can be qued and downloaded and tracked.
- The office apps are already installed but creating basic Excel and Word stuff is limited and you can only read Power Point presentations.
- Media player is clunky and requires syncing, no copy/paste. They bug you a lot to purchase stuff from their store.

I will report on specific apps later after I play some more.

 

[shortylickens]

IE:
Loads up fast and on wifi it finds pages quickly. Typing in the URL box has quick auto-search and complete. I just typed in tiav and it immediately knew I wanted tiava.com.
Has tabs and the option to choose between mobile and desktop.

Vids load up fast and look good, and when you hit the volume rocker a little button pops up that lets you quickly disable the ringer while watching the video, which I thought was a neat touch.
Pics display fast but zoomed in they always look pixelated with dithered color, even if they are very large and you are only zoomed in 50%.

- You need to install the Youtube app just to view the web based vids. The app itself only takes you to the web version. It will not let you view HD unless there is some trick I dont know. You cant choose to go portrait and the controls are limited. Vids are smooth but the colors are badly dithered, worse than watching regular vids on other sites.

- I miss having a menu button and the home button doesnt do much. Not many things have a menu system. The status bar disappears frequently and you cant view it most of the time.

- The water racing game looks good and runs smoothly. Didnt hiccup or crash.

- Have tried running lots of heavy stuff all in a row, nothing froze or crashed my system. Multitasking sucks cuz near as I can tell I always have to go back to the home menu and find the shortcut again.

- You dont see your wallpaper except when resuming from standby. Limited pics included. Lots of ringtones and alert sounds available. Most of them are quite pleasant.

- Lots of good stuff to download both free and paid, but since it does the basics well (email, calender and such can all be viewed on live tiles) I havent needed to download a lot yet. It would seem that darn near everything which is paid can also be tried free for a while. I dunno if that was a requirement by Microsoft or just a coincidence.

- The netflix app downloads and installs quickly. One log in and you get everything, queues, streaming, account settings, all of it. App is slick and easy to use. Streaming looks like ass. Pixelated and dithered colors, even on wifi. I cant see a way to do HD, subtitles or episode selection for TV shows. I have no idea what it does to my battery. But I dont think I'll be interested in regular viewing, even with quality headphones.

- The market for AT&T streaming videos is nice but not as good as the podcast market for the ipad/iphone. And why would I buy stuff when I got hulu & netflix anyway?

Will use the navigation later tonight when theres no traffic, but the maps seem nice.
- Maps are clean and smooth, pinch and double tap zoom work well. Satellite view doesnt hiccup at all. Traffic is OK but not complete, I happen to know highway 28 is packed but they show nothing.

 

[hanoverphist]

- Loudspeaker is weak and crummy. Earpiece is weak and crummy. Other people tell me my voice sounds muffled.
- No SD slot that I can find. Camera is mediocre but I prefer my SLR anyway. It does have a strong flash, but with poor color it doesnt matter.

is it sounding muffled when on speaker phone or just in general? is it hard to hear people on the ear piece in a normal kind of world noise area? that would be a definite negative for me.

no SD slot at all? even behind the battery? thats weird. i thought that was the new "must have" feataure for smart phones.

i wish companies could put really good cameras in these things, seems to be going backwards on that front. that is the one thing i absolutely loved about my old samsung winmo phone, the camera was very good.

 

[dougp]

You must not research things before you buy them.

- Menu button is big and easy to find. Other buttons are small or flush and not easy to hit, but maybe thats a good thing. Holding down the power button merely shuts it off, does not access airplane mode or themes or anything. Holding down the menu button only brings up the voice functions, not editable so far as I can tell.

There's no "menu" button on the device. You have Back, "Start" and Search on the front, camera on the right and volume on the left with the power button on top.

- Loudspeaker is weak and crummy. Earpiece is weak and crummy. Other people tell me my voice sounds muffled.

No complaints from anyone about my Quantum, and the speaker sounds fine. Maybe yours is faulty?

- No SD slot that I can find. Camera is mediocre but I prefer my SLR anyway. It does have a strong flash, but with poor color it doesnt matter.

Only 1 AT&T WP7 devices has microSD, the Focus - and even then, MS has been spotty about the support.

- Xbox live is neat with some fun games, easy to navigate. BUT, you cant keep shortcuts to those games on the desktop, unless I am missing something. Games acquired through the regular app market can be stickied

You're missing something. All games can be pinned to the start menu, hold down on them until the submenu comes up and then select pin to start.

Media player is clunky and requires syncing, no copy/paste. They bug you a lot to purchase stuff from their store.

Do you mean there's no explorer-style interface to copy and paste music? Of course, you use the Zune software. Don't forget to setup wireless-sync, it's pretty damn nifty.

- You need to install the Youtube app just to view the web based vids. The app itself only takes you to the web version. It will not let you view HD unless there is some trick I dont know. You cant choose to go portrait and the controls are limited. Vids are smooth but the colors are badly dithered, worse than watching regular vids on other sites.

Install SuperTube - great YouTube replacement. MS is about to go after Google in EU supposedly because Google won't approve MS's true YouTube app.

- Have tried running lots of heavy stuff all in a row, nothing froze or crashed my system. Multitasking sucks cuz near as I can tell I always have to go back to the home menu and find the shortcut again.

True multi-tasking is coming in Mango - supposedly Fall timeframe.

- The netflix app downloads and installs quickly. One log in and you get everything, queues, streaming, account settings, all of it. App is slick and easy to use. Streaming looks like ass. Pixelated and dithered colors, even on wifi. I cant see a way to do HD, subtitles or episode selection for TV shows. I have no idea what it does to my battery. But I dont think I'll be interested in regular viewing, even with quality headphones.

Netflix will generally get better in 5 minutes or so, no worries.

 

[pm]

Nice review, Shorty. Thanks.

 

[shortylickens]

OK, navigation is nice except it doesnt seem to actually navigate. Not turn-by-turn voice anyway.
Unless I'm missing something.

Its nice, much nicer than the iphone 4.
Widgets or active tiles are good because they let me see whats important at a glance without having to dig into things.
App store is small and most stuff costs money. The free junk isnt so hot.
I liked the news 360 program on the Playbook but here it just seems clunky, even though its pretty.
Overall nothing special and I dont wanna wait on future updates with the hope it will get better. Will return it on Monday if ATT is open.
Then I will wait for Nokia to release theirs and see if MS adds lots of good stuff to their OS updates.