LG Accolade VX5600 Cell Phone Review

Hardware & Functionality

The left side of this Accolade is shown in Figure 8. It has a 2.5 mm standard headphone jack with cover, a volume rocker, a voice command key, and a covered micro USB port. Since this phone’s memory is very limited, the headphone jack will only be useful for hands-free conversations with wired headphones rather than for listening to music.

Figure 8: The left side

The right side of the phone has a button for the camera, as shown in Figure 9. Unfortunately, the camera button can be inadvertently pressed when trying to open the phone. While we learned to avoid it by holding the phone closer to the bottom, we found this a definite design flaw. Near the top of the phone on this side you can also see the hole where a lanyard can be attached.

Figure 9: The right side

The 3.1 megapixel camera can’t compare to the cameras on some of the newer smartphones, but it can be used to catch a quick picture in an emergency or when you want to remember something. The camera has no flash. Although pictures are not spectacular, the camera does have noise reduction, night mode
, white balance, several special effects, and a self-timer. It also includes digital zoom, although this is not available in the highest resolution (1280 x 960). The camera also has some basic editing functions like cropping and rotating.

Although you can email the pictures from the phone or send them by MMS, we found no way to transfer them directly to the computer. The phone does support Bluetooth, so you could possibly send pictures to a printer or computer in that manner, but right now there are simply not enough Bluetooth-enabled printers or computers to make this method available for most. LG should give people who purchase this phone an easy way to transfer the photos to a computer.

One other thing to note is that because of the very limited storage in this phone, even though you take pictures at the highest resolution, they may be automatically converted to a lower resolution if there is not enough storage space.