Review: LG dLite
Aug 2, 2010, 9:18 PM by Philip Berne
The LG dLite is a tall order for one of LG's first T-Mobile phones. The stylish flip nailed the basics, but is this phone all about looks?
Form
Is It Your Type?
Is It Your Type?
The LG dLite is a fun, colorful flip phone with a unique style and plenty of flashing lights. It offers a playful menu design, though beneath the surface you'll find a familiar set of features. It might be lacking in advanced capabilities, but it comes through in plenty of ways that count.
Body
The LG dLite is tall. Even with the flip closed, the phone is less than an inch shorter than some tablet phones I have on hand. But with that flip opened, the dLite towers. This isn't a bad thing, as the extra length means the phone can easily stretch from your ear to your mouth, even if you have a noggin as huge as my own.
At the very top of the phone, when it's flipped open, there's a clear bit of plastic, and when the phone needs to alert you a set of flashing LED lights appears to light up this clear edge. Similarly, the external face of the flip is a flat sheet of plastic, but there is a hidden dot matrix display beneath that will offer the time, caller ID numbers and some bright animations when the phone enters standby.
Crack open the bright pink or blue flip and you'll find a white belly inside. The phone is almost entirely white in the middle, save for a color accent around the navigation ring. The number pad is broken into discrete rows, and keys were easy to hit for dialing or casual texting.
Besides the numbers and the circular, 4-way navigation button, there are also two soft keys closest to the screen, a key to open the Web browser and a key for the multi-tasking menu. The browser key seems like a strange choice. The phone does not have a great browser, nor is this a phone aimed at Web addicts. A voice dialing key or a text message key would have been a better choice. Inside the flip you'll also find a row of keys for Send, End and Back.
On the right side of the phone you'll find a camera key. There's no auto focus on the LG dLite, so it's just a simple button. There's also a microUSB port that can be used for charging and for headphones. I'd rather see a 3.5mm headphone jack so I can use my favorite earbuds, but at least LG is kind enough to bundle a pair of microUSB headphones with a microphone for making calls.
On the left side of the phone is a volume rocker button. It was a bit thin, a bit shallow, but still easy to find with my thumb without looking for it. The microSD card slot is hidden under the battery cover, but thankfully it's not under the battery itself.
The Three S's
Screen
The internal display is plenty big. The screen stretches 2.8-inches diagonally, and pushes 400 by 240 pixels. That's very respectable for a feature phone. There is some room around the display, but the phone seems well-proportioned for its height.
Under all lighting conditions, the LG dLite worked well. Indoors, the screen seemed bright and vibrant with color. The colors on the interface are somewhat muted, but looking at pictures and Web pages the phone looked great. Outside, the dLite didn't lose too much brightness, even on a bright, sunny day. I occasionally saw some reflected glare, but it was never hard to find the right viewing angle.
The external display is very bright. Made up of an array of LED dots, it was easy to read indoors and out.
Sound
Sound quality on the LG dLite was also solid. Through the earpiece, my calls had a crisp, present sound that made callers seem like they were standing nearby. The earpiece was not blisteringly loud, but I never had trouble hearing my caller, even in a crowded, noisy mall or riding with my windows rolled down. I was duly impressed.
The speakerphone was also nice and loud. At full blast, I had no trouble hearing the dLite speaker over car noise or across the room. Likewise, ringtones were always audible, no matter where I had hidden the phone. With the sound turned off, the phone had an aggressive vibration, but with full pockets, it was more difficult to feel the dLite, and I missed a call once in a while.
Signal
The LG dLite also has good network reception. In the PhoneScoop vault (a local theater where all my local networks drop out) the dLite still managed to cling to a bar of service, even though data dropped down from 3G service to T-Mobile's slower EDGE network. A test call was still able to go through, and data would load okay in the Web browser, albeit much more slowly. Signal strength did hurt sound quality, though, and that test call had some dropout moments, but I did not lose the call entirely.
Battery
I was easily able to go three days without charging the LG dLite. Most of that time was spent making phone calls and sending text messages, with some light data use for the social networking app and e-mail, and almost no heavy use in GPS navigation or Web browsing. I think that matches what the average dLite buyer will be doing with this phone, so that's what the average buyer should expect. In a flat-out talk test, I managed a single phone call that lasted just over 6 hours, which is a bit more than LG's own estimates. The phone charges over microUSB, plugged into a wall outlet or a computer.
Basics
Menus
The menu design options on the LG dLite are cute and even playful, but they aren't organized in a useful way. On the home screen, you can choose from a small number of animated wallpapers. These don't offer much information beyond the time and date, but they are a bit playful. The 4-way button opens a standard array of shortcuts by default. Pressing the center button opens the Faves menu, a favorite contact screen. You can also jump to the call log or the contact list, compose a new text message or open the camera for a framed MMS picture message. These shortcuts are not customizable, which is too bad. There is already a Contacts shortcut assigned to the right soft key, and pressing the Send key opens the call log, so both of these shortcuts are redundant. Plus, the phone has a dedicated camera button. So, three out of four shortcuts around the d-pad are mostly useless.
The main menu screen was not very well organized. First, LG wastes space by plastering the word "Menu" at the top. Why not just stick the word "Phone" at the top of the home screen, too, while we're being obvious? The first menu option is "Downloads." This always irks me, when carriers make their download store a top priority on a feature phone. It's an obvious money grab. I would bury the "Help" menu deeper into the menu to free up space at the top level. After all, the phone is pretty simple, how often will I be looking for help?
The rest of the options are straight forward, except for the "Organizer" menu choice. This is where you'll find the Voice Command app and the TeleNav GPS Navigation, neither of which seem appropriate for the Organizer. There's also a calendar and alarm clock, but the contact list gets its own menu option. Instead, the Organizer gets a calculator, tip calculator and unit converter.
I'd like to see more useful apps bubble up to the top level of the menus. Maybe the photo gallery, music player or Social Buzz apps, if not the GPS navigation or more advanced features. Better yet, I'd really like to be able to customize the main menu to place my favorite apps where I want them.
With three slightly different, animated themes for the menus, the LG dLite can seem playful, but the phone couldn't keep up with its own designs. One theme has a little bird fluttering around and landing on your menu choice as you move the selector, but the phone can't draw the bird fast enough, so it seems to teleport from one option to the next. Throughout the phone, the interface seemed sluggish. It worked, it just moved very slowly.
Calls / Contacts
Making calls on the LG dLite is simple. Start dialing a number, and the dLite will suggest matches from your contact list while you type. Once you're in a call, the phone offers shortcuts to activate the speaker or mute the phone. If you'd like to connect a third party for a conference, you can simply dial the numbers and press send while you're in a call. Once you have that third party connected, a quick dive into the menus lets you join the two calls or swap between them.
You can search the address book for a contact's number. The phone performs more of a sort than a search. If you search for "Phi" you'll get my name, but if you search for "lip" you'll jump to the "L" portion of the list. This also means that you can't search by last name. Search for "Berne" and you'll jump to the "B" section of the contact list, sorted by first name.
The dLite offers a Faves screen for favorite contacts. Press the center button from the standby screen and the faves cards pop up. You can assign different favorites, and the phone presents you with picture cards that you can flip through to find your intended caller. Once you click on a favorite, you have the option to call that person, send e-mail or text messages or start an IM chat. You can also view your recent history with that person. The Faves interface can be useful, but I had problems with it. First, pictures looked pinched in the Faves card window. Second, that slow interface made flipping through cards, then flipping through the contact options within a card, feel sluggish. I'd like this to feel fast and snappy, since it is a shortcut, after all.
Messaging
The LG dLite has a simple assortment of messaging options. These should be enough for keeping in touch, but there were some problems that could be annoying. The phone has text messaging and MMS messaging. There's also a simple IM chat client, an e-mail app and even a Social Buzz app for social networking support. For text messaging, the app is very basic. To enter a recipient, the phone searches the contact list by default. If you want to add a new number, you have to dig through menus to find the "New Number" option. Since the contact search feature is so basic, I wonder why these methods couldn't be integrated into a single field, like they are on most new smartphones. Type a number and search, each from the same spot.
The IM client supports AIM, Windows Live and Yahoo Messenger. It worked fine in my tests, with little lag between messages. The e-mail client supports AOL, Gmail and Hotmail with preset options, or it can try to figure out settings when you enter your own e-mail address. With my Gmail account, it was able to create different folders based on my Gmail labels.
For social networking fans, the phone comes with a Social Buzz app. This is a rudimentary app for checking status updates on Twitter, MySpace and Facebook. There's nothing else to it, it's only for reading updates and posting your own status message. It's heavily reminiscent of the AT&T Social Net app that AT&T is bundling on its feature phones.
The phone does a terrible job handling messaging alerts. Text message alerts work just fine, but for e-mail and Social Buzz, the alerts are a mess. For e-mail, alerts would come very late after a message arrived, sometimes hours later. In both e-mail and Social Buzz, opening the alert message did not take me directly to my new messages. On e-mail it took me to the e-mail account, so I could at least open the inbox and figure out what was new. Of course, it doesn't help that the first option under e-mail is "New E-mail," which does not show your unread messages, but rather helps you create a new outgoing e-mail.
Alerts for new messages in Social Buzz seem to lead nowhere at all. Clicking an alert opens the Social Buzz app, but there was never an obvious new message to find. The app seems to alert the user whenever there is a new Twitter message. Not a new @reply or a new direct messsage, any new message at all. The app also might have alerted me to new Facebook messages, but I'm not sure. An indicator would appear next to the tiny Facebook icon, but the Social Buzz app was never able to open my Facebook inbox. I would select the Facebook tab and the indicator would disappear, though no new messages would pop up; the phone simply tried and tried to load my inbox but could not succeed.
Extras
Music
There is a music player on the LG dLite, and it did a fine job playing my tunes. I connected the phone to my computer in mass storage mode over USB and simply dragged over a folder called "Music," and the phone found all my tracks with no trouble. Album artwork was a mixed bag; some tracks had album covers and some did not with no apparent rhyme or reason, even within the same album. The player itself is easy to use with few extras. There are four preset equalizers, but otherwise no frills or special options. You can minimize the music player to keep your tunes playing while you perform other tasks, but the dLite doesn't offer music controls except on the Now Playing screen. The player is smart enough to cut the music for certain tasks, like video recording, then start playing again once you've finished. But it really needs a quick way to jump back into the playback controls.
Camera
Camera
The camera app is bare bones, with few options to tweak images on the 2 megapixel shooter. To launch the camera, you can press the dedicated camera button. A few times during my testing, the camera app crashed, requiring a complete battery pull to restart the phone. This was very infrequent, perhaps three times in a week's heavy use.
You can adjust white balance and choose from a limited selection of shot modes. There is a night mode, though it did not seem to help under low light conditions. There are also color modes for black and white or sepia tones.
Once you've taken a shot, the dLite has a nice selection of options for sending the photo along. You can upload to a variety of online albums, including Flickr, Kodak, Photobucket and Snapfish, in addition to T-Mobile's own My Album Online. You can also send photos to your desktop over Bluetooth. The phone has GPS capabilities, but it does not offer to geo-tag photos to show them on a map later.
Image Gallery
The LG dLite has a surprisingly robust image gallery with a fine assortment of editing features to tweak your pics. The gallery itself shows a single image almost full screen up top, with a row of thumbnails lining the bottom. Once you've selected an image, you can enter a zoom mode or edit the photo. In the editor, you can crop, rotate and resize your pics. There are also a number of color adjustment options, so you can have the phone automatically adjust levels, color balance, brightness and contrast or exposure, among other options. There are even fun image filters. Beyond the simple sepia and black and white modes from the camera, you can add a filter for a mosaic look, a cartoon or water color image, and other various filter effects. You can also add stamps from a small selection of tiny graphics. The gallery has a slide show mode, and you can even print to a Bluetooth-enabled printer. I wouldn't call these images print-worthy, but if you create a masterpiece, the option is there.
Image Quality
Photos
Photos from the LG dLite were about as good as I'd expect from a low-resolution, inexpensive feature phone with no auto focus. Indoors, photos were speckled with color noise, and without a flash the camera was unable to handle low light situations. Outside, the pictures looked a little better, but there was still plenty of blurred details and noise in the dark spots. I saw plenty of bright glare from harsh backlighting, and the camera had difficulty with red tones, like most small sensor cameraphones.
Video
Video quality was likewise disappointing. The phone can shoot QVGA videos, but these looked pretty bad. Movies had the wavy quality I associate with bad cell phone video, and there was plenty of pixelation and blurring across the board.
3GPP / MPEG-4 format (viewable with QuickTime)
Browse / Customize
Browse
Don't expect anything more than simple, mobile Web browsing on the LG dLite. I found the browser to be very slow. Pages took a longer time to load than I expected on T-Mobile's 3G network. Navigating pages could also be a chore. Pages moves slowly past as I clicked the 4-way button, and the browser can only navigate by jumping link to link, the phone does not scroll smoothly. There is a menu option for zoom, but the browser also hides a long list of keyboard shortcuts. All 12 keys get their own shortcut, including a pair of keys that zoom in and out without needing to use the menu. It definitely helps, but the browser takes a long time to zoom in at every step, then redraw the text on the page to be legible once you've zoomed in close enough to read it.
Our own PhoneScoop homepage looked pretty good in the Web browser, but it couldn't handle most HTML pages I tried. CNN and the New York Times would not offer the phone their full desktop version, only the mobile counterpart. The phone uses the same font in the main interface and the Web browser. While those playful, whimsical fonts might look good in the menus, they look silly in the browser. So, I had to switch to the more business-like of the three font choices every time I wanted to spend a long time reading pages on the Web.
Customize
There are a few customization options on the LG dLite, but LG and T-Mobile miss some cool opportunities. The dot matrix display, for instance, has a number of animations you can play in standby mode. You can even create your own image to appear on the hidden, external screen, but you can't animate it yourself. I would have loved to create a multi-frame animated picture. There are three different themes to choose from, with three different system-wide fonts. There are also a handful of animated wallpapers.
The hidden light show is also customizable. There are a number of color options to choose from, and a few different lighting patterns. Again, I wish I could create my own custom light show here, but the different LED colors look great, very bright and vibrant.
Extras
Bluetooth
Bluetooth on the LG dLite worked perfectly. I was able to pair the phone with my Bluetooth headsets and my stereo Bluetooth speakers with no trouble. I was also able to send pics to my laptop using Bluetooth from the image gallery.
Clock
The LG dLite shows a clock on the hidden external display when the flip is closed. When that clock disappears, just press the volume key and it lights up again. Inside, there is a tiny clock at the top of the screen that lingers through most of the phone's open apps. Each animated wallpaper has its own clock design on the wallpaper itself, as well.
GPS
GPS performance worked fine with the LG dLite. TeleNav's software was easily able to find me quickly and track me through my trips in and out of the downtown Dallas area. The only time I had trouble with the GPS software was entering addresses. Typing in street names, I noticed that the shift and space keys had been reversed. The "0" key should add a space; the "#" key should capitalize letters, but these two were reversed. Also, the app would not let me enter only a ZIP code as a destination address. TeleNav on other phones allows this with no trouble, but on the dLite I could not confirm my choice without a full postal address.
Video Tour
Wrap-Up
It was hard to write this review without overusing the words simple and basic, because that's the best way to describe this phone. At times, the LG dLite comes across as elegant, with great call quality, reception and battery life. That's enough to recommend this phone to buyers looking for a fun device for themselves or their children, without all the bells and whistles of a high-end feature phone or a smartphone. The best way to use this phone would be to buy it without a data plan and just stick to phone calls and basic messaging. Once you dive into the more advanced features, things get a little murky.
Some of these features were just average. The Web browser and music player, for instance, were no better or worse than I expected from this flip phone. Some were worse than I expected, like the low quality camera or the Social Buzz app, with its unreliable and confusing notification system. On the whole, nothing beyond the calling and basic messaging features were impressive.
Still, for the right buyer that will be just fine. The phone has a fun look and feel, with plenty of flash and dazzle. There are bright, animated light shows that pop up on the external shell, and you can customize these with a few fun options. The phone has a unique look that is eye catching, but it's also functional, stretching the handset from your ear to your mouth with ease. If you want a cell phone that focuses on looking good and making calls that sound great, the LG dLite is a fine choice.
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