Hello Everyone.
I received my LG wine phone yesterday so this email is just to provide
first impressions. These are my rough notes so far and I am posting them
here to give people an idea of what to expect. your mileage may vary. I
have not used the phone extensively as yet having only had it for 24
hours. The phone seems very well built. the keypad is very tactile. in
the box, you have a headset, USB cable, battery and the phone itself.
when you open the phone, you have to remove a protective film from the
keypad. the keypad has large easy to feel buttons that are slightly
raised. Pros for the handset so far include:
build quality.
battery life.
the keypad and size of screen.
android 5.1.1.
ease of use. the stock launcher is quite accessible.
navigation can be carried out a lot of the time using the arrows and
select, though this does not work in all apps. occasionally you may need
the touch screen.
loud speaker.
seems to include options for people who are hard of hearing, but as I am
not hard of hearing I would be unsure how to test these or what to look
for when testing.
the ability to assign at least 1 of the buttons to launch your favourite
apps.
a pretty decent 8MP camera despite what some specs may say. on some
websites they have the camera down as 3MP.
keypad layout. the buttons are as follows. across the top from left to
right you have back, home and recent apps. next there is a disk which is
the up, down left and right arrows with select in the middle. around the
disk there are 4 physical buttons for launching various apps camera,
contacts, phone and 1 which is customisable. below the disk from left to
right you have call, clear and reject/power button.
then you have your standard keypad.
from the home screen, you can press and hold star to bring up your
notifications drawer. you can then arrow to the various notifications or
just arrow to clear all and press select.
its very comforting to have the keypad and makes a refreshing change.
little or no bloteware, its pretty close to stock android in terms of
included apps apart from the launcher, so not many apps to disable.
issues at the moment include:
2 finger talkback accessibility shortcut not enabled by default when you
power on. so you have to do the following to enable accessibility. when
the phone has fully powered up hopefully it should play a tone though I
found this hit and miss. I waited for around 3 minutes to be sure. then
you have to do the following to enable talkback (instructions to be
verified only tried them once).
arrow down twice
select
down twice
right
select
select
right
select
select
this should enable talkback. make sure to enable the option for speaking
of passwords as this will help you to enter your password correctly.
typing is not very good at all initially. this seems to be an issue with
the LG keyboard implementation. when in lower case mode, talkback will
read out the letter you've typed and then say english lowercase which
can be extremely annoying. if you switch to upper case or symbols or
numbers, it does not say upper case, symbols etc after typing a letter.
text entry is similar to a nokia keypad with number 1 reserved for
punctuation. to switch to different case options you press hash. I am
currently trying to find an alternative T9 keyboard, as the problem
seems only to exist with the LG keyboard having tried other T9
keyboards. i would advise people to be careful when entering text, and
if anyone's found a workaround please let me know. it may also be worth
disabling auto correct, word suggestions and spelling corrections in
language and input, keyboard settings for the LG keyboard.
sometimes in the playstore pressing select after typing a search term
doesn't work. you have to tap on screen on 1 of the suggestions to
initiate a search. I am going to ask someone fully sighted in case there
is something i'm missing to initiate the search.
conclusion so far:
a very capable and fairly priced handset which will appeal to a lot of
people. its well built, and with the right minor tweeks its excellent
for those wanting a simple or indeed an advanced phone. its very
responsive with a quad core processor /1GB of ram under the hood, though
if you're installing a lot of apps i'd recommend you buy an SD card. it
also has a removable battery so you can buy spares.
I will post more responses to this thread as I use the phone.
all the best,
Mo.
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