My review of the LG Neon. (long)

[Cry Havoc]

This phone was so amazing, I had to write a review of it:

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LG Neon Review

5/10/2010

When writing a review of a product, a reviewer must take into account a number of variables to make a decision. This may be such things as "ride quality" in the case of automobiles, to "truthiness" in the case of Stephen Colbert's, to "willingness to maul tourists" in the case of Black Bears from Yellowstone National Park. These decisions are usually based on a system of weighing the pros (sharpness of claws) with the cons (distracted by pic-a-nic baskets) to ascertain an idea of whether or not a particular feature is done properly. When this is all spliced together, it forms a comprehensive set of ratings that everyone skips over as they scroll down to the "overall score".

Thankfully, with the kind-of-new Neon cell phone, LG has completely spared me of any of the above effort. In fact, this phone doesn't even really receive a complete rating, instead opting for the, "How crazy are you?" side of things. This is due to the fact that the more out of touch with reality and all those pink elephants you keep in your house, the more likely you are to adore this phone.

1

Now, I'm a fair person. So I'm going to start with the things this phone actually does well. They are as follows:

It has a QWERTY keyboard.

It has a nice camera.

Okaaay, moving on to the negatives.

Let me sum it up for you: It's trash. In fact, I hesitate to even call it a phone. I mean, phones allow a person to make calls to talk to another individual in a remote location, correct? The Neon will definitely call someone. Whether your call will make their phone ring (fairly likely), transmit your voice to them (not so likely), or allow you to hear the person you're calling (unlikely) is another matter entirely. Due to the fact that this phone averages, and I'm not making this up, around TWENTY SECONDS from the time the other person picks up until you can actually hear their voice, I have no choice but to believe the Neon was originally designed for a horror movie, in which the killer has an extra third of a minute in which to stalk and/or reach his victim. Yes, that makes sense. The 20 second sound delay is actually a feature. In which case, the phone was named improperly. It should be called the LG Suspense, because after all, what fun is making a phone call unless there's a 50% chance that the other person will hang up before you can hear them?

I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's roll a bit and see what this fun-house of a phone is purportedly able to do and be.

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Phone Description:

You know what? Eff that. This phone doesn't deserve being described. It's a candy bar phone that slides horizontally. Google the damn thing if you want to look at it… I know I don't. If you want to see it close up, shoot me an email and in a month when the HTC Evo 4G is released, I'll send you this one for free, provided you agree to sign a contract stating that you will not commit suicide upon using this phone. I don't want to be responsible for any untimely deaths on my conscience. If I get multiple requests for this phone, I'm going to send it to the person who sounds the most mentally unstable, because if they get it in the mail and think it's a pony, there's less of a chance they'll notice that it's not functioning as billed (and yes, I'm aware that I just stated that the Neon has a better chance of being a pony than a good phone… kind of amazing when you think about it) and offing themselves.

Features:

The LG Neon does come with a couple of billed "features" for a cheap "Go-Phone". For starters, it has a 2 megapixel camera, which as I said takes pretty decent images. It has a rollout horizontally sliding faceplate that reveals a QWERTY keyboard underneath, which is great for texting, in theory. Everything else about this phone is pretty much industry standard.

The simple problem is that nothing on this phone works. For starters, let's pretend you're the CEO of a cell phone making company. A tech comes to you with a blueprint of a phone, featuring a sweet QWERTY keyboard interface that will allow people to text quickly between each other (undoubtedly a hot-ticket item these days). What, then, is your next, logical course of action?

"Let's make the buttons small and round!" cries the CEO. "So that it's really difficult to find where the ideal pressing point is when a person is using their thumbs!" The tech is slightly miffed at this, but is probably thinking to himself that there is a perfectly logical reason for this manuever. "Perhaps to leave more room on the keypad for extra commonly used punctuation marks and emoticons!" He thinks excitedly to himself. However, the CEO continues, unabashedly.

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"Yes! We'll use all that space to make large spaces between the keys, so that when people try to press down on them, they'll hit the spacer instead of the letter they want!" The CEO's eyes are gleaming now, and he looks a little bit like an eating champion at a steak buffet. The tech tries to keep calm, thinking it couldn't get much worse. Oh, boy.

"And get this... this is my invention that will change the way people type forever!" Exclaims the CEO. "We'll put the "b" key on the WRONG SIDE OF THE KEYBOARD! How AMAZING will that... b!" The CEO is clearly fasctinated by his inner genius. Meanwhile, the tech is curiously regarding the burgundy horns sprouting from behind the CEO's head that he never noticed before.

Yes friends, all of the above is true. The LG Neon has a massive keypad area, of which precisely about 50% of it is used for the actual keys. Here's a photo so you know I'm not just trying to inflict mental anguish on you for no reason.

http://www.thebestdigital.com/wp-con...do-lg-neon.jpg

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Now, WHY on Earth would you make a full QWERTY horizontally slide out keypad only to make the letters and numbers SLIGHTLY larger than those on a Blackberry? Oh, I know, because the cell phone R&D at LG is obviously a bunch of hooting wankers.

You'll also note that I'm not joking about the "B" key. Now, to a hunt and peck typist, this obviously is of minimal importance. To someone who's been typing for more than 6 months on a keyboard though, it's a freaking nightmare. WHY would you make a key that's typically struck by the left hand all the way to the right side of the keypad? Have you never sent a text message in your lif--Oh yeah, hooting wankers. Got it.

You'll notice that there are numbers being left alone by themselves in the course of this article. That is not to indicate "sections", although if you'd really like to be that scientific with this review, by all means. That is actually meant to denote the number of times my phone has spontaneously decided that it would rather not be functioning during the course of my review, and has self-terminated. Which leads me to my primary complaint about the phone: The UI (user-interface, since you probably know me if you're reading this, and I definitely have some non-geeky friends, you silly people you).

I thought of many hyperbolic ways to express my frustration with the LG Suspense. I thought of comparing it to being stomped in the man parts by an obese elephant, or maybe making the decision in the morning to wear a "Bite me" T-shirt on the day the zombie apocalypse just happens to arrive. Yeah, sucks. However, I'll go with something computer related when describing the stability and speed of this phone:

It makes me miss Windows 95. , it makes me miss Windows 98 (FIRST EDITION!). I'm not joking. This phone actually has to "think" about what it wants to do when it gets a text message. Which means, if you're sending a text message, you get a massive overlay letting you know, "Hey you, you've got a text mes-OH I'M FROZEN." You see, apparently this phone was designed from some point in the past where there was a temporal distortion, and suddenly technicians for LG thought it would be a good idea to make a phone that locks up whenever you give it more than one command at a time. This means if you're sending a text and you get a call, you're lucky if the phone doesn't shut itself off. If you're deleting text messages (100 text messages takes around 5 minutes to delete, so make sure you have some free time) and you get an incoming text, the whole phone bogs down to the point of almost no usability at all.

The UI is so insanely slow on this phone that simply unlocking the phone requires about 5 seconds of waiting for the phone to load the "To Unlock, press 'Yes'" screen, then to reload the original screen behind it. Trying to send a text that's more than 200 characters long? Good luck, because the phone will routinely miss about 1 in 15 inputs, meaning if you're typing and you don't notice it, you can end up with a garbled bunch of text that takes 30 seconds to remove because THE UI IS SO SLOW IT BOGS DOWN WHEN DELETING MORE THAN THREE CHARACTERS AT A TIME.

5.

I'm done. There are so many other things I could rant about with this phone, like how every time you send a text message it kicks you back out to the homescreen, so you have to go through the bogged down menus all over again to send another text to the same person (and this is all AFTER you wait for the "message sent" overlay to block your screen and slow the phone down some more). But I can't even write about this phone anymore. Saying the Suspense has damaged LG as a reliable manufacturer of electronics in my eyes is dangerously similar to saying that The Adventures of Pluto Nash was a less than stellar hit at the box office. It's tantamount to describing the inside of a category 5 hurricane as "slightly discomforting". This absolute black hole of suck that they labeled a phone is blessed with the incredible ability to raise your blood pressure just by using it. It is the single worst electronics device of any sort that I have ever owned. And yes, that includes the Sega CD, the Nintendo Power Glove, AND my old Betamax tape recorder, which was a great device, but unfortunately had the habit of SHOCKING THE out of me when I tried to move it. Or touch it. And you know what? I prefer being moderately electrocuted to the Suspense. I can't wear rubber gloves to counter how badly this phone sucks.

Overall rating: " you LG"/10.

[lefty]

LG?


My mom told me when I was a kid: " never buy anything from LG; ever ! "

[eyeh8u]

remember when lg was lucky goldstar that ty company from korea