LG Vortex Cell Phone Review

The Hardware

One of the places that LG used to lower the price of the Vortex is in the processor. While most Android smartphones have at least a 1 GHz processor, the Vortex has a lesser-powered 600 MHz processor. The Vortex, however, seems to be snappy enough for everyday use. We noticed a slight slowdown when we used processor intensive processes like the “Live” ever-changing wallpapers. Also, even though Android 2.2 supports flash, you cannot play flash videos on the Vortex because of the hardware limitations. This is an obvious thing you will be giving up to save a little money.

At 3.2,” the screen is a little small. This is obvious when viewing web pages and when using the on-screen keyboard. The Vortex has Swype, which we really like, but the on-screen keys are just slightly smaller than most.

Calls that we made and received on the Vortex were loud and clear. The only times we noticed a bit of crackling was on the rare occasions that we had a very low signal. The LG Vortex has a rated talk time of seven hours and 30 minutes and a standby time of 20 days and 20 hours. However, our Vortex conked out after only five days with minimal use. We don’t think this is a major flaw, since most people who own these smart phones get quite used to having to charge them every night. With average use, the Vortex will get you through t
he day.

As shown in Figure 11, the Vortex has on-screen buttons for the Phone and Contacts on the left and Messaging and the Browser on the right. Between these is a black on-screen icon that lets you bring up the applications screen. As with other Android phones, you can use the Android Market place to download additional Apps.

Figure 11: The home screen

Like other Android phones, the Vortex has a useful notification shade that can be pulled down to show the current notifications. The Vortex, however, has an additional feature. When the notification screen is open, there is a row of settings shortcuts up the top. These include quick access to the sound, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, and Background Sync features and are shown in Figure 12.

Figure 12: The notification shade

The Vortex also has other phone features including a conference calling, voice dialing, a voice recorder, and text and multimedia messaging. It also has capable email functionality including access to POP3, IMAP, and Exchange email as well as a universal inbox.

With additional fee to Verizon, the Vortex can also be a mobile hot spot for up to five other devices. The Vortex also supports visual voicemail. We should, however, mention that Verizon charges and additional monthly fee of USD 2.99 for visual voice mail, which is included in AT&T’s iPhone subscriptions.

The Vortex has five home screens and two more can be added. Like other phones of this type, these screens are highly customizable with apps, resizable widgets, folders, and wallpapers. We were able to use Skype Mobile with little effort.

Unlike some of the major changes that Motorola and Samsung make to the Android interface, the LG changes seem minor and much more subtle. For instance, the contact list is slightly different in that it gives you the last status update for each contact just below the person’s name in the full contact list. You can also do a few unusual, but useful things like view only contacts with phone numbers.

There were, however, also things we didn’t like. We had more difficulty setting up a POP mail account on the Vortex than with other Android phone and this may have been because of certain LG customizations. We also noticed differences in the Facebook and Twitter applications and we liked the regular Android apps better, but this may be a matter of preference.

Two things we didn’t like about the Vortex interface was that it was tied to Bing as the search engine and that some applications could not be removed. So we could not make Google the default search engine and we were unable to uninstall the demo versions of Tetris and Scrabble even though they were unplayable without the purchase of the full versions.