Fancy A Jog-wheeler !
After wooing us with the Chocolate fashion phone, LG is keeping up the pressure with the launch of its music phone, the U400. Can this funketeer have the same impact as its sweet stablemate?
If you’re anyone in the mobile phone industry you’ve got to have
yourself a music-toting phone. With mobile music hotter than Satan’s
homestead, handset manufacturers are clamouring to get themselves a slice
of the music pie. You’ve seen Sony Ericsson clean up with its ever-expanding
family of Walkman phones, Nokia has Xpress phones, the 4GB hard drive packing
N91 and the twisting 3250, while Samsung rocks up with the i300 fighting its
music corner.
Well, now it’s LG’s turn to take the stage with the U400, or Neo as it’s been nicknamed. With the music controls front side, the Korean outfit has already proclaimed its U880 and U890 handsets MP3 competent, but the U400 is its first handset to really push the mobile music mojo.
The U400 will be exclusive to LG’s best buddy, 3, as always, and is scheduled to hit the stores in July. But 3G.co.uk has managed to to get our grubby mitts on a pre-production sample so we can tell you all about it. It’s worth noting that this phone and its software are still in development, so while we can gauge roughly how the U400 will perform, LG will have tweaked, tightened and debugged for the final shop model.
Just like Keanu Reeves’ Neo character from the Matrix movies, the phone is swathed in black – with blue trimming around the navigation controls – using its stable mate’s Chocolate handset design as a starting point. The U400 is less minimalist, though, and more funky looking, in keeping with its rock’n’roll lifestyle.
It is a little bigger than the Chocolate phone but remains a compact, pocketable device. The slide action is slick when opening but stubborn to close but this should loosen after continual use, while the navigation controls are centred around a jog-wheel dial, adopted previously on the Samsung i300 handset.
Of course, most of you will recognise this technique from the Apple iPod but where the computer giant licked the wheel approach, our experience with mobiles is shaky. The i300’s wheel proved a tricky customer but the spinner on the U400 fared slightly better. LG has informed us that this is still in development, so expect a more polished performance.
Luckily the wheel does moonlight as a five-way joypad and we found ourselves increasingly drawn to adopting this familiar style of operation. Old habits die hard perhaps. Having the soft keys tightly flanking the touch-wheel is also a distraction and hardly intuitive, and you’ll find you’re drawn to the call key to select.
Java-powered 3 Player
The 3 network has already snapped up two prestigious award gongs for its music service so it’s not surprising to see the U400 totally geared towards accessing and using 3’s music store.
The Java-powered 3 Player is fired up by the left soft key and once in the application you can play your tracks by adding new songs to the playlist or browse the 3 music store and download full tracks over-the-air.
LG’s proprietary My DJ music software was early in its development stage and very primitive. We managed to upload MP3 tracks from our PC to the phone’s main music library quite easily via USB. But we’ve been assured final versions will let you rip your CDs onto the phone and create playlists.
Storage arrives via microSD cards and this format currently reaches a capacity of 1GB, which holds about 250 good-quality tracks. 2GB cards are on the way so if you have a large library of songs you may have to wait.
The U400 also supports the A2DP Bluetooth profile so you can wirelessly stream your music to a pair of compatible headphones but more importantly the bundled headphone remote contains a 3.5mm jack so you can connect your quality cans. Hook up your ‘phones and the U400 reveals itself to be a very skilful music player. Able to handle any genre of music, it serves up a full sound, brimming with bass and detail with little distortion at high volumes.
If you have a few spare minutes, LG has embedded a DJing application that lets you scratch over your MP3 tracks using the wheel pad, adding percussion and sound effects. Mildly diverting.
Beyond it’s music-centric features, two elements really impressed. Firstly, the two-inch QVGA display is very striking with crisp detail, while its video call performance was a pleasant surprise. We made a call to the new Sony Ericsson V630, and the quality was enough to wax lyrical about the virtues of video telephony. Well, almost. Obviously, mugshot pixelation did occur but for the best part the headshots were quite clear. Past experience testing 3G phones has taught us to use headphones to engage in a two-way conversation but for once you can rely on the Neo’s built in speakers. The audio quality pumped out was loud and discernible.
Along with the front-loaded VGA camera for video calls, a two–megapixel shutterbug shoots the still images and video footage. It’s disappointing to see no autofocus on board and the U400’s picture quality does fall short of Sony Ericsson’s leading two-ers, the W900i, K750i and the W800 range. The snaps display a remarkable lack of focus especially around the fringes and while it’s relatively strong with colour representation, details are too blurred.
Outside of the GB hard-drive crew, the LG U400 carries all the necessary features you could demand from today’s music phone. It’s a decent, funky little number that should prove a popular addition to 3’s handset portfolio. It does fall a little short of Sony Ericsson’s more realised Walkman range, but the Neo is nevertheless a solid music-phone debut from LG.
This review covers the above mobile phone only and does not address the performance of any 3G Network. The score is based on a 3G mobile phone checklist.
Copyright : You are advised that this material is the copyright of www.3G.co.uk and is our own personal view only. (C) All rights reserved 2005. Whist every care has been taken in the preparation of this review, the author nor 3G.co.uk cannot be held responsible for the accuracy or authenticity of the information it contains, or consequence arising from it.
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