LG Glimmer Review

Interface:

The user interface on the Glimmer has been optimized for use with the touchscreen and is closely related to the LG Prada, Viewty, and Vu. The home screen shows various status indicators across the top, such as the signal strength, Bluetooth, SD card, battery level and the current time. Located near the bottom left of the home screen is the shortcuts arrow, which will bring up a list showing 8 commonly used features, but the user can replace each one with 18 other selections. Directly below the shortcuts arrow are icons for the main menu, dial pad, messaging, and contacts.

The main menu is logically laid out into four sections: Phone Options, Multimedia, Tools, and Device Settings. It is easy to navigate between these sections, as it uses tabs along the right side of the screen. There are no included menu themes per se, but does allow the user to select between four different font styles (Gothic, Serif, Joy, and Script) and sizes, background style color schemes (Black, Blue, Pond, and Metal) and menu icons (B&W or Color). This actually allows for more personalization by the user than simply selecting a preloaded theme.




Phonebook:

The phonebook will allow up to 500 contacts to be saved, each with their name, 5 phone numbers, 3 e-mail addresses, group, memo, web site, ringtone and picture. When saving a contact’s phone number, it will allow you to have multiple mobile, home, work, and fax numbers per person. Once a contact is saved, you can then assign them to one of the 98 speed dial locations. Accessing a saved contact is easily done by pressing the phonebook icon on the bottom of the home screen, which will bring all of them up in alphabetical order. You can then choose to scroll through the list, or type in the person’s first or last name, which will automatically begin a search.

Pressing the phone icon located on the home screen will bring up a 12-key dialpad for entering a number to call. We did not experience any problems using the touch-dialpad, as we did with the Samsung Glyde, and were able to use it consistently, instead of the internal mechanical dialpad. However, it is the consumer’s choice as to which one they prefer using, but there is a “cool” factor in using the touchscreen to call someone.

Finding the speaker-independent Voice Command feature can be rather tricky, as it is located in the tools section of the main menu, but can be added by the user to the shortcuts menu. We would have rather of seen a dedicated button for this located on the dialpad or side of the phone. Available commands are Call Name or Number, Voicemail, Missed Calls, Messages, and Time & Date. The most useful of these is the Call Name or Number, which allows you to speak the name of a stored contact or the digits for the phone to dial. This feature is very useful while in a car and can also be used in conjunction with a Bluetooth earpiece. In most environments, the Voice Command had almost no problem understand the names or numbers that we wanted it to call, but some errors did occur while in noisy environments such malls and stores.


Organizer:

When launching the Calendar, it begins by showing you the current month with the date highlighted in yellow. From there, you can move forward or backward one month at a time by pressing the left and right arrows at the top of the screen, select a month or year by using the drop-down list, or type in a specific date to go to. Once the desired date is reached you can add an event, including the Start Time, Name, Repeat, Alarm, and Tone. After an event is saved, it will notify you by playing the designated tone and by displaying the alert information on the screen.

Separate from the calendar are three independent alarms and one quick alarm. The standard alarms allow you to select the desired start time and reoccurrence, while the quick alarm only allows you to set it for 10, 30, or 60 minutes from the current time.

The phone comes with 128MB of internal memory, but is partitioned between different applications and features on the device. Only 37MB are available for multimedia files, such as images, sounds, and videos. Reserved memory shows that it can store up to 400 messages in the inbox, 500 contacts, 300 calendar events, and 20 memos. Luckily, the Glimmer also supports the use of microSD memory cards, but only up to 4GB in size (not SDHC cards). This will provide most consumers with enough space for MP3 music files and saving images and videos from the camera.