LG XENON
Specifications:
Network:
- GSM 850, 900, 1800, 1900
- HSDPA 850, 1900, 2100
Screen:
- TFT touch screen, 65,000 colors
- 240 x 400 pixels, 2.8 inches
- QWERTY keyboard
Weight & Dimension:
- 108 g, 3.81 oz.
- (105.5 x 53.5 x 15.8) mm
- (4.16 x 2.11 x 0.62) inc.
Memory:
- 500 entries: with multiple contact storage entries
- 30 (received, dialed & missed calls)
- Internal memory: 100 MB
- Expansion Slot: microSD up to 16 GB
Data Service & Connectivity:
- GPRS Class 10
- EDGE Class 10
- HSCSD
- HSDPA 3.6 Mbps
- Bluetooth v2.0
- microUSB v2.0
Ringtones:
- MP3, Polyphonic
- Vibration
Camera
- 2 MP, 1600 x 1200 pixels
- Flash, Geo-tagging
- Video recording
Battery:
- Standard battery, Li-Ion 950 mAh
- Stand-by time up to: 264 h
- Talk time up to: 4 h
- SMS, MMS, Email, RSS, IM
- GPS, a-GPS Support
- Hands free
- T9 text feature
- Photo, video editor
- WAP 2.0, xHTML, HTML
- Music player: MP3, WAV, e-AAC+, WMA, AMR, MPEG4, 3gp
Product summary:
The good: The LG Xenon has an attractive touch-screen display, a great QWERTY keyboard, customizable standby screens, plenty of shortcuts, and lots of features like 3G speeds, quad-band support, a 2-megapixel camera, GPS, and more.
The bad: The LG Xenon suffers from the lack of POP or IMAP e-mail support, the touch screen suffers from a slight learning curve, the Web browser feels a little clunky, and you're limited to only six widgets to customize the home screen.
The bottom line: Despite a few problems, the LG Xenon is one of the better messaging phones we've seen, plus it has a cool touch-screen interface and plenty of features.
Reviews:
Dominating its entire front surface is a large 2.8-inch touch-screen display. It's smaller than the 3-inch displays on the LG Dare and the LG Vu, but it still looks good. It supports 262,000 colors and 240x400 pixels, which result in great-looking graphics and colorful images. You can view the date, time, battery life, signal strength, and photo caller ID. Even when the screen is locked, you can see the date and time in a screen overlay. You can set the brightness, the backlight timer, and the font size. For dialing fonts, you can set the color as well.
Along the top of the screen are three icons, each of which corresponds to one of three customizable standby screens. You get one just for your favorite contacts, one for the home screen, and one for your favorite application shortcuts. All standby screens have four shortcut icons along the bottom, which correspond to the phone dialer, the contacts list, the messaging menu, and the main menu. The main menu interface is similar to the one on the Vu, with four tabs along the right to differentiate applications. You get one tab for Phone-related apps, one for Multimedia, one for My Stuff (which includes the media gallery plus productivity tools), and another for Settings.
The LG Xenon also has a drop-down shortcuts menu it calls the "Annunciator." Simply tap the top part of any screen, and a list of shortcuts will appear. You can go directly to the music player, toggle the Bluetooth connection on and off, set your ring and vibration profile, send a new text message, send a new mobile e-mail, check your voice mail, start the instant messenger for either Yahoo, AOL, or Windows Live, set your alarm clock, or view the calendar.
Dominating its entire front surface is a large 2.8-inch touch-screen display. It's smaller than the 3-inch displays on the LG Dare and the LG Vu, but it still looks good. It supports 262,000 colors and 240x400 pixels, which result in great-looking graphics and colorful images. You can view the date, time, battery life, signal strength, and photo caller ID. Even when the screen is locked, you can see the date and time in a screen overlay. You can set the brightness, the backlight timer, and the font size. For dialing fonts, you can set the color as well.
Along the top of the screen are three icons, each of which corresponds to one of three customizable standby screens. You get one just for your favorite contacts, one for the home screen, and one for your favorite application shortcuts. All standby screens have four shortcut icons along the bottom, which correspond to the phone dialer, the contacts list, the messaging menu, and the main menu. The main menu interface is similar to the one on the Vu, with four tabs along the right to differentiate applications. You get one tab for Phone-related apps, one for Multimedia, one for My Stuff (which includes the media gallery plus productivity tools), and another for Settings.
For the favorite contacts screen, just follow the instructions to add a contact from your phone book. The contacts will then appear as small icons with the person's name, phone number, and photo. You can have up to three pages of favorite contacts, and you can arrange them on the screen however you wish by dragging and dropping the icons, or you can align them with the grid. You can also fix the icons so they don't change position with the screen orientation. As for the shortcuts screen, you can add up to nine shortcuts. To add and remove shortcuts, simply press and hold down on a shortcut icon.
The home screen is also customizable with a variety of widgets, similar to the TouchWiz interface on some Samsung phones. On the bottom left of the Xenon's home screen is a little right arrow that opens up to reveal a tray of widgets. There are only six to choose from, though; there's an analog clock, a world clock, the calendar, sticky notes, the image gallery, and the music player. To add a widget to the home screen, just drag and drop it on the page. You can then close the tray by pressing the little left arrow.
Features
The LG Xenon has a rather skimpy 500-entry phone book, with room in each entry for two phone numbers, an e-mail address, and a memo. You can assign contacts to caller groups, have a photo for caller ID, and one of 10 polyphonic ringtones or one of 10 message alert tones. Basic features include a vibrate mode, a speakerphone, text and multimedia messaging, a calendar, an alarm clock, a calculator, a voice recorder, voice command, a notepad, a world clock, a tasks list, a stopwatch, a tip calculator, and a unit converter.
More advanced users will like the stereo Bluetooth, instant messaging (with AIM, Yahoo, and Windows Live accounts), mobile e-mail, and A-GPS. The mobile e-mail is housed within a Web-based interface and will only support e-mail from certain accounts like Yahoo, AOL, AIM, Windows Live Hotmail, AT&T Yahoo, BellSouth, Comcast, Earthlink, Juno, Mindspring, and NetZero. We weren't able to use Gmail, especially since the Xenon doesn't support POP or IMAP. As for A-GPS, the Xenon comes with AT&T Navigator, AT&T's turn-by-turn location-based service.
As with most touch-screen phones, we expect there to be a full HTML browser to make use of the larger screen real estate, and on that point, we're not disappointed. We also like that you can open up multiple browser windows, which act like tabbed browsing. Like on a regular browser, you can change the font size, toggle pop-up windows, turn off images, and more. However, the Media Net browser on the Xenon proved to be clunkier than we would like. Even though it renders most pages just fine, it sometimes won't load CSS designs properly and the page would look a little strange. You have to zoom in and out of pages using the little magnifying glass icon, which can be a bit tedious after a while, as there was often a lag. Also, because the screen is so small, you'll have to scroll a lot more through pages. Thankfully, the arrows on the QWERTY keyboard make this easier.
Since the Xenon comes with 3G/HSDPA, it is compatible with AT&T's array of broadband services, which include AT&T's Cellular Video, which lets you watch streaming video clips from content providers like CNN and CBS, AT&T Video Share, which lets you make one-way video calls to another Video Share-compatible phone, and of course AT&T Mobile Music, a music portal with an online music store, courtesy of Napster. Also in the AT&T Mobile Music offering is XM Radio Mobile, a streaming service for satellite radio subscribers, Music ID, a song ID service, music videos courtesy of MobiVJ, a music fan community, and a ringtone maker.
Performance:
LG Xenon in San Francisco using AT&T's service. Call quality was very impressive. Callers could hardly hear any static or background noise, though they could still tell we were on a cell phone due to the slightly robotic quality to our voice. On our end, we did hear a bit of static and echo, which were amplified when we turned on the speakerphone. It wasn't too bad, but still noticeable.
The LG Xenon has a rated battery life of four hours talk time and 11 days in standby time. It has a tested talk time of 5 hours and 21 minutes. According to the FCC, the LG Xenon has a digital SAR rating of 0.686 watt per kilogram.
S amsung introduces the LG Xenon cell phone. A quick messaging phone boasting a full keypad for text messaging beneath its vibrant colors and large touch screen display with customizable and intuitive user interface, the 3G-powered LG Xenon snaps 2.0 megapixel digital photos and offers the full suite of AT&T entertainment services such as AT&T Navigator, Napster Mobile, eMusic Mobile, and more.Not only does the Xenon have a slide-out QWERTY keyboard for messaging, it also has a large touch-screen interface similar to the one on the LG Vu. Unlike the Vu however, the Xenon has a home screen customizable with widgets, dedicated pages for favorite contacts and applications, and something called the "Annunciator," which is essentially a drop-down menu of certain shortcuts. Aside from that, the Xenon has almost the same features as the Vu: a 2-megapixel camera, a music player, a full HTML browser, stereo Bluetooth, and more.
