Full LG Xenon Review

Introduction

The LG Xenon is equipped with two input methods, touch screen and a full QWERTY keyboard. This is a winning combination because fast typing with the touch screen is hard, and using the keyboard makes your LG Xenon cell phone in to a micro laptop. LG is a company with years of experience in designing and manufacturing cell phones which are known to be durable and reliable. The LG Xenon is a beautiful phone with a simple and clean design.

Design (4 out of 5)

The design of the LG Xenon is clean and elegant. Some phones have a lot of buttons that you’ll never use, but all of the buttons and keys of the LG Xenon are in the right position to ensure easy access and control. The phone is a little bit heavy because of the sliding mechanism and the keyboard and it weighs in at 108 g. This is a big phone. The size of the LG Xenon is 105.5 x 53.5 x 15.8 mm. It comes in Black, Blue and Red colors. The screen on the LG Xenon uses TFT touchscreen technology which shows only 65K colors and has a resolution of 240 x 400 pixels, it is 2.8 inches in size. The screen doesn’t meet todays standards and may be the worst thing about this phone.

User Interface (3 out of 5)

Using the LG Xenon is very easy and intuitive. LG succeeded in making this phone easy to operate. There is a great menu which can be accessed both from the touchscreen and the keyboard. The icons of the menu are well designed making navigating through the menu very easy and fast even when using the touch screen. The operating system that runs on this cell phone is made by LG and this is another disadvantage. There aren’t many applications developed for it which limits the capabilities of this phone. The Android OS would have been a better solution because there are a lot of free applications. But implementing Android OS is impossible because the LG Xenon lacks the processor power for running Android applications. The LG Xenon has a good user interface, but it is no match for the Android OS.

Features (2 out of 5)

The LG Xenon has great features like: GPRS, EDGE, 3G, Bluetooth and micro USB for data connection. There is no Wi-Fi which is a big disadvantage. The built in camera is 2 MP, offering shots at 1600x1200 pixels, with flash, Geo-tagging and the ability to record QVGA video. The capabilities of the camera are modest compared to the other more advanced smartphones. The LG Xenon has an MP3/WAV/e-AAC+/WMA/AMR audio player and MP4/3gp video player and also features a photo and video editor.

The internal memory of 80 MB in the LG Xenon isn’t much but it has a memory card expansion slot for Micro SD memory cards and it supports up to 16 GB of memory. Its phonebook supports 500 entries and has Photocall. The LG Xenon can remember the last 30 received, 30 dialed and 30 missed calls. It features an Internet Browser with support for WAP 2.0/xHTML and HTML. If you are a person who likes to surf the Internet to check your Facebook or Twitter profile, then the LG Xenon is not the phone for you because it doesn’t offer native support for social networking.

Performance (2 out of 5)

The speed and responsiveness to commands is fair given that there are no applications that require a lot of processor power. The call sound quality is great which is typical for LG phones. The LG Xenon has a standard Li-Ion battery with 950 mAh that is enough for 264 hours stand-by and 4 hours talk time.

The Verdict (2 out of 5)

The LG Xenon was released in April 2009 and besides its good looks the technology and features built in it are outdated. The main disadvantages are the poor screen quality and the lack of Wi-Fi connectivity. The 65K colors that the screen can show are not enough for todays standards. The pictures and videos played on the phone lack details, contrast and color which is not acceptable for a phone with large screen size.Today, there are more powerful models of cell phones that have better options and offer better Internet connectivity including social networking. In other words, the LG Xenon is outdated and can’t cope with the standards implemented by the smartphones of today. To read about two great smartphones read this comparison of iPhone 4 vs BlackBerry.