LG F9200 review (AT&T)

The camera included with the LG F9200 is VGA, which is pretty mediocre as far as camera phones go. However, it comes with a slew of options that helps make the snapshots a bit more palatable. You get four image resolutions (128x160, 160x120, 320x240, and 640x480), and you can control the brightness, the white balance (Auto, Daylight, Incandescent, Cloudy, and Fluorescent) and the image effects (Color, Sepia, and Mono). There's also a self-timer of 3 or 10 seconds; a 4X zoom; and a multishot feature that lets you take up to three photos at once. Plus, you can choose from one of three different shutter sounds or just turn it off. A flash was the only thing we missed. Once saved, the photos can be used as wallpaper, sent to friends via a multimedia message or set as a picture caller ID, as mentioned above. Another nice feature is that it lets you check the remaining phone memory to gauge how many more pictures you can take. This is a good thing, since the phone comes with a paltry 8K of memory and doesn't have an expanded memory slot. For a VGA camera, photo quality was solid; although pictures were a bit dark, image definition was sharp, and color quality was acceptable.

The LG F9200 comes with Java (J2ME) support for games and applications, and a game called Action in Life already is preloaded; you can, of course, purchase and download more games if you feel like it. You can personalize the phone with one of five included varieties of wallpaper or a screensaver that displays the current time, or you can switch to a list view of the menu, as opposed to the traditional icon view. As usual, you can purchase and download additional wallpaper, screensavers, ring tones, and graphics from Cingular via the WAP 2.0 wireless Web browser.

We tested the dual-band, dual-mode (GSM 850/1900; GPRS) LG F9200 in San Francisco on Cingular Wireless. The phone performed well; callers heard us loud and clear and vice versa. Callers said they could tell we were on a cell phone, and windy conditions muffled our voice a bit, but that didn't deter from the quality of the call. The Media Net portal was predictably poky, and since we were limited to sites that weren't graphic intensive and media rich, the browser was underwhelming, to say the least.

LG claims the F9200 has up to 4 hours of talk time and up to 12 days of standby time. In our tests, we doubled the talk time to an impressive 8 hours but got only 6.5 days of standby time. According to FCC radiation tests, the LG F9200 has a digital SAR rating of 0.89 watts per kilogram.