LG Accolade VX5600 Cell Phone Review

Using the Accolade

The LG Accolade VX5600 is a CDMA 1900/800 MHz phone offered by Verizon. In our testing, call quality was excellent on both ends of the conversation. Even in noisy places the background sounds were kept to a minimum. The speakerphone quality was adequate. The Bluetooth headsets that we tried gave us good quality, as well. The Accolade is M4/T4 hearing aid compatible. You also can set the phone to read out numbers as you type the on the keypad.

The back of the phone and the lithium ion battery are shown in Figure 10. The battery is rated for up to 7.5 hours of talk time and up to 670 hours in standby mode.

Figure 10: The back of the Accolade

This Accolade has only 34MB of internal memory and doesn’t have a memory card slot, so it is very limited in its capabilities. There is no music player. Although you can use it to access the Internet, the lack of memory and small screen will drastically curb your surfing ability. You can add VZ Navigator for GPS guided driving directions but most people who buy this phone will probably not want to incur the added cost of a the Navigator or a multi-media package. This phone, however, also supports Verizon’s Family Locator service. Although this is an added monthly cost, it may be useful to some.

The phone is capable of text messaging and MMS, but if you text a lot you would be better off to get a phone with a dedicated keyboard instead of texting on the cumbersome numeric keypad.

The Accolade VX5600 does an admirable job of storing contacts. You can have up to 1000 contacts. Each one can have a name, 5 phone numbers, 2 emails, an IM screen name, a picture, a special ringtone, and a street address. You can take a picture with your phone and easily attach it to any contact. You can scroll though your contact list or perform a search. You can also set any contact up to a speed dial as there are 999 speed dial locations.

The Accolade also has a calculator, notepad, world clock, notepad, to-do list, and stop watch.

There is a slight indent that runs along the sides of the Accolade (shown in Figures 8 and 9). This indent makes gives you a place to open the phone. Unfortunately, the bottom of the phone, shown in Figure 11, has no such indent. Even after a few weeks of using the phone, we still found the phone a bit difficult to open quickly and one-handed opening was very difficult. Since the top and the bottom of the phone are similar in size and shape, it was often difficult to tell which way the phone was oriented when we grabbed it in a hurry.

The Accolade VX5600 supports voice dialing and the button on the side of the phone makes it very easy to access.

Figure 11: The bottom of the Accolade