LG Rumor Touch user reviews (blue, Sprint)

Pros Touch screen. Send multiple messages with pics and video. Large 3in Display played a huge part in my purchase. Fast EV-DO data.

Cons Poor web browser. Touch screen can be funky. Sprint TV was just awful.

Summary Love the 3in display and touch screen. I like the camera options but you can only zoom in camcorder but not camera hmmm? Get the Opera mini browser ASAP, it works great and give you true HTML experience minus flash. A decent PDF viewer and few other tools. A good music player and ability to download music on the fly. Now the sprint tv is my biggest complaint. Even with all my ev-do bars I rarely can get anything at all. Now to the media player, it plays mp4 but it is a bit choppy just enough to annoy you. Hate to get off track but the Opera mini will jam up if you play youtube on it. The stock browser works the best youtube and that's it. All in all I bought it to replace my palm centro which had such a lil screen and buttons though it was a great media player without a doubt. The LG rumor touch is a good buy for a 3in screen msg phone with great features.

Updated on Sep 8, 2010

Got off phone with sprint. THE RUMOR TOUCH HAS A DEFECT IN SPRINT TV. Tech support told me this. New update does not fix it. 2nd Rumor Touch so this seems to be the whole line of LG Rumor phones. Customer Service was horrible but the tech guys are honest.

Pros Good feature set for non-smartphone with email, Facebook, Twitter, Opera Mini, and has touchscreen; touchscreen is pretty accurate; 3G is definite plus; bubble-style texting interface is handy; includes predictive text feature for a decent keyboard.

Cons Touchscreen can be a pain when scrolling through menus; Hello UI hard to get to, therefore kind of useless; keyboard layout not great; game selection sucks unless you are willing to pay; data plan priced like smartphone; Sprint's network; camcorder

Summary Verizon has its Envs and Sprint has its Rumors. LG and Verizon obviously have a decent partnership, because the Rumor Touch is not the Env Touch. However, the Env Touch was an editor's choice, so it's pretty hard to be as great. That being said, the Rumor Touch is pretty decent in its own right.

User Interface (Touchscreen):

The touchscreen is not bad for a resistive one, but it is still resistive. Scrolling through menus often results in the accidental selecting of an icon, and keep your fingernails long. All in all, though, it is responsive enough for all but those who have been using capacitive screens since 2007. And let's face it, if you have been using capacitive screens since '07, you're probably not going to buy this phone anyway.

Overall, the UI is simple enough to understand and navigate, and the menus are easily customizable in an intuitive and simple way. The Hello UI is cool, but it's really hard to get to, and so I, for one, never use it, which is a real shame because it is a great concept, just poorly executed. Still, BREW (Qualcomm's OS, used on the phone) is simple and straightforward and will appeal to the heavy texter, and even the average one.

Features

The Rumor Touch has a great feature set for the most part, with dedicated Google Maps, email, Twitter, and Facebook apps. It also has both a default browser and the excellent Opera Mini, which is speedy and easy to use and great over a 3G connection. The email app is far from spectacular, and only works with Yahoo! and Gmail (so I couldn't hook up my Verizon account), but hey, it's there, and most people I know use Yahoo! and Gmail anyway. Still, it's really not a Blackberry. The Twitter and Facebook apps are similar to the email in that they are far for great, but they're there and that's a bonus any day on a feature phone (P.S.--I don't use Facebook and Twitter, so I really haven't used them except to see what they were--you should get a second opinion on them.). Google Maps is an awesome app that works as a GPS; it's kind of slow, but it will help if you are completely lost and need help, which is really what it's supposed to do.

There are plenty of web applications you can download through Opera Mini, but there is very little freeware. There are a few decent ones for free, but prepare to pay if you want anything truly productive. The games on the phone are bad; Tetris is the only one that comes with the phone and is free; Prepare to pay 5 bucks for everything, literally everything, else.

Media

There is a microSD slot on the phone that can support up to 32gb microSD cards, so if you use it, you can put all the music on it you want, provided you buy the card. The multimedia is not bad. Sound quality is good, and videos are pretty much what you would expect from a 240x400 screen--kind of watchable.

The camera is not terrible, but not terribly good either. It takes 2.0 megapixel still, and auto-adjust but lacks any decent zoom feature. In short, it's a standard featurephone camera. Never use the camcorder. Never. Please. It records at QVGA resolution (320x240) and is really bad. That said, so is pretty much every non-smartphone camcorder on the market.

None of the browsers on the phone have any sort of Flash Player, but they will play YouTube videos. If you choose "standard quality," the phone usually has no problems playing the video. You can also choose "high quality" on YouTube, but the phone often stutters and the quality is not much better--meaning bad.

Other Things of Importance

The phone, despite being pretty much all plastic, feels pretty sturdy.

Sprint's network is, in my opinion, bad. Really bad. If you use and like Sprint, hey, have fun, maybe it's great for you, maybe Pittsburgh, PA is just a bad area for them. I don't like it, but it's not bad enough to be a deal-breaker for me.

Call quality on the phone is good, not amazing, but not bad either. It will be just fine for just about everybody.

Wrap-up

There was really nothing about this phone that really blew me away, but there was nothing that made me cringe either. The good things about this phone definitely outweigh the bad, and the few bad things are really mostly minor and hardly deal-breakers.

For everyone except heavy smartphone users, this phone will be great.

Updated on Sep 11, 2010

Forgot to mention some tech things:

The phone has a microUSB port that can connect to your computer so you can share your media, provided your media is on the microSD card you shelled out the extra cash for (though the phone does come with a 1GB card. The microUSB also serves as the connection to the charger.

There is a 3.5mm headphone jack, as usual. There is a dedicated camera button and volume rocker on the left (when looking at the screen) side of the phone, and there is a dedicated power/screen lock button on the right side. These are basic but still good additions to the phone.

Pros The touchScreen is quick, and i'm one of those women who like to get nails done, and the touch screen registers my nails. the camera takes amazing pictures and it's not bulky phone.Txting is very easy..i must say i am 200% satified

Cons Nothing really bad about the phone at all. It's an awesome touchscreen with full slide out Qwerty keyboard!

Summary If you want a phone a little on the cheaper side but has awesome features...i would say this is definatly the phone to go with! i'm very happy with this phone, can't find anything i don't like about it.

Pros I got a brilliant red color. The touchscreen is pretty responsive and it's very durable.

Cons The way they have the menus set up. They don't have the side button for the voice command, you have to do it manually.

Summary I just got this phone today and I like it pretty much and I have a pretty good feelings about the 2 years that I have to use this phone. Before I have a chocolate phone in Verizon, but I switched to Sprint because people around me kept saying that Sprint's better and I wanted to pay less for my very first touch screen phone. When I started playing around, I tried to find the ringtones, but it was very confusing....It was way different from Verizon Phone'ss interfaces and setup. This phone doesn't even let be put a big clock or something on the main screen. So the main screen is blank with just your screensaver. Although it's sort of boringish, it had all what I needed which is why I'm satisfied still.