I used to have an LG CU500, it was the best cellphone I had ever owned! My wife Evilesmile has owned a LG Scoop, forever and she loves it (all except the charging port, which is complete and utter shit!). Well within the last few months she has had to replace her phone twice because of the aforementioned charging port. (With that much trouble one would think that LG would have issued a recall to fix their shit!) I used to work for Alltel, so I've seen how many have came back with this issue.
So within the last month or so, LG has released a new phone to take the place of the LG AX260 Scoop, it is quaintly called the LG Banter. We seen this phone at Alltel, (they had a live phone on display) so my wife tinkered with it a bit, as did I, and it seemed great on the surface...... She decided she wanted it, so we did the upgrade and got it.
Now out of the box, it was great. It was a little larger than the aforementioned Scoop, but it still had a nice hand feel, and looked great. Then as we got to using it the candy coating started to melt in our hands.
I guess I will start with the good points first:
1. The keyboard is laid out so much better, all of your most commonly used symbols are actually on the letters, which are accessible with the orange FN button. No more searching through a drop down menu...as much. It also had a extra row for the numbers which was a nice addition as well!
2.Even though the camera is a 1.3 megapixel, (the same as the Scoop), they seemed to have fixed the lag time on the lens shutter, which makes taking pics faster overall.
3. MicroSD support was great!!! It will support a 16GB card, which is great, but more on that in the things we hate section.
4. The charging port was decent, way the hell better than the Scoop charger, but it still had some minor issues. More on that later as well.
Well that about sums it up for the things we liked about the LG Banter, (there wasn't a lot LOL). Now on to the things that make the LG Banter one of the worst piece of shit upgrade replacements for the Scoop!
1. The first thing that happened after we got it (we had maybe had it a total of about 10 minutes) the damn thing reset itself. Which is understandable for new phones to do, with retrieving updates and whatnot, but that was just the beginning! Over the course of 24 hours the Banter had reset itself a total of 12 times (which is a big pain in the ass when you are trying to use the damn thing), and It froze up completely one time, pixelating the screen forcing us to remove the battery to do a hard reset!
2. Now as I said before the keyboard was laid out very nicely, but it had issues as well!!! You could not type as fast on the Banter as you could with the Scoop; it was impossible due to the keyboard lag.
3. The charging port was a little better; it wasn't quite as flimsy, but was still in the same shitty location at the bottom end of the phone. That means if you have it plugged in and have it slid open and texting you will be putting pressure on the charging port, which is one of the things that killed the charging port on the Scoop.
4. The battery life is mediocre at best; after a few minutes on the web with it you better know right the hell where your charger is at! Ah and another thing, the Bluetooth works great, except for the fact that you can't Bluetooth your ring tones....(Alltel says it's due to copyright infringement, when actually they did it to make money off their ringtones!)
5. Now it time for the short lived glory of the aforementioned 16GB Micro SD card. At first we thought "FUCK YES" a 16GB card WOOOOHOOOOO!!! Then the horror of what LG and Alltel had done set in. They had stripped away the video ability of the phone. You cannot take a video, and you cannot play an existing video from your memory card, there is no support. Now why have a phone with the capacity to support a 16GB memory card and then strip out the one functional option that would even begin to justify having a memory card that large! Fucking Genius!!! Since all you can store on it is the ring tones you download from Alltel, and the wallpapers they offer, and the pictures you take with the phone yourself, it doesn't make any since to support a card that large! Taking pictures on you camera phone, you would have to take roughly 2000 pics to take up 1.5 GB of the said card. Now for MP3's you could fit 33 (give or take depending on bit rate quality) entire albums on your card. This was just to give you an idea on how big 16GB is.
Bottom line: If LG gets there heads out of there asses, and does a quick recall on the LG Banter, and fix these issues they will have quite a nice phone! Not offering video support was just about the stupidest thing LG did, "what the fuck" were they thinking!! Anybody who is taking 2000 pic is either a professional photographer, or at least someone with a Goddamn camera!! Furthermore, 33 albums, come on buy a fucking Ipod or some shit, and god knows nobody can afford to buy enough fucking ring tones and wallpapers from Alltel to fill the fucking card up!!!!
Alltel has some great phones out there, even more after Verizon takes over. But if you want to upgrade, be wary of the LG Banter. If you don't mind no video functionality and some resetting issues, and other minor annoyances (which should be resolved in time) It's a decent phone. Now for those of you that have a LG Scoop right now, keep it as long as you can, because when you upgrade you might be faced with getting the Banter, and when you do an insurance claim on your Scoop, if they don't have anymore (Scoops) in stock guess what, you get a Banter.
So buyer beware! Do your homework before buying!
Friday, May 1, 2009
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