LG PRADA II Review

Messaging:

As it has become clear, the PRADA II offers a good organizer and a handy keyboard and even though it cannot replace the modern smartphones, it might as well be a decent solution for a businessman (or a lady maybe), concerned about style. The phone doesn’t exactly offer automatic e-mail configuration, but it is not manual either.  Unlike offerings from Samsung and Nokia, the LG automatically pulls information but then walks you through step by step to confirm.  Make sure to read the hints carefully and be sure to activate SMTP Authentication if you’re using Gmail, because otherwise you won’t be able to send e-mails. This whole process is really slower and harder than it needs to be.

We have said this already, but the hardware keyboard is handy. The on-screen version, however, has only one variation, which replicates the standard keys of a phone. Thanks to the good sensitivity of the display and the decent size of the keys, typing with it is not a problem. Unfortunately, other ways for text input are missing, like handwriting recognition.



Internet:

Do you remember that we have mentioned the PRADA II has a multi-touch screen? Even if you have not used the iPhone, you may have at least seen how easy it is to view internet pages by tapping (zooms the image so that it is best seen on the screen) and “pinching” (zooms in and out). Well, when it comes to LG products, things in this aspect have nothing in common. The full web browser renders pages slowly and does not support the automatic adjustment by tapping option. Zooming in by “stretching” the image with two fingers is present, but it has nothing to do with the one from the iPhone, in which you can see the image get larger in real time. Here, this is done after a certain delay, and the final result may be rather unexpected. We got used to examining some online advertisements rather closely (closer than we’ve wanted). If you finally get a chance to zoom in on what you really want, you will notice that it is fairly blurred and reading text is an extremely difficult task. Still, you have automatic screen orientation switching thanks to the accelerometer, which performs…you guessed it - slowly!


You may think that we are used to browsers, such as Safari and Opera Mobile 9.5? Well, actually surfing the internet with any new Sony Ericsson phone is more pleasant than with the PRADA II. With them, things are a lot easier and faster for sure.

On the other hand, the phone supports HSDPA 7.2 Mbit/s, assuring high-speed internet, as well as Wi-Fi. It is quad-band and thus usable in the whole world, but its 3G support is limited only to Europe and Asia. Stereo Bluetooth is also onboard.