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"Major improvements over the 8100. Great phone." on by tomconroy
Pros: Strong vibrate, excellent voice recognition S/W, easy access phonebook
Cons: Slightly poorer reception that prior phones with no extendable antenna.
Summary: I bought an LG8100 after trying a Motorola i815 for several weeks. The Motorola had many good features but its phonebook access was awful and you couldn't rely on the vibrate to catch a call. The phonebook only allowed entry of the first letter of the name you were seeking and then you had to scoll to find the right one. Not very convenient at all. The vibrate ring was so weak, the only hope of knowing you had a call was that it would eventually switch to an audible ring. Not a good thing if you've chosen vibrate to be inconspicuous. Enter the LG line.
My first phone was an LG8100. It has a great phonebook access system, allowing you to type in as many letters of the name you want and allowing you to go directly to it. The vibrate feature is excellent. Maybe not as strong as the LG 4400 but definitely a world better than the Motorola. Unfortunately, it has archaic voice recognition software that rarely recognizes the name you want in less than three tries. So you're limited in using it with bluetooth.
Not to be frustrated, I then transitioned to the LG 8300. Wow. This phone is sharp looking, it is even lighter than the LG 8100, and it has the same excellent phonebook and vibrate attributes as the earlier model. But unhearlded is the fact that this phone has infinitely improved voice recognition software. It is as good as the Motorola and works almost perfectly. The only downside for me is that signal strengths seem to be a little lower than I found on the earlier LG or on the Motorola. But I've not lost any calls yet and I love the features and functionality. -
"Great phone, but..." on by An Honest Myth
Pros: Great sound quality, good reception, mp3 player, ability to customize, battery life
Cons: High pitched noise from inner display, outer display could be better, music navigation needs improvement
Summary: This was my first attempt at a flip phone, and I must say that it is outstanding compared to those my friends have owned over the years. As an individual who was cautious about finally upgrading beyond my old 2-color Kyocera "brick," which has been 100% reliable and virtually indestructible for the past 4 years, I bit the bullet and upgraded to a VX8300 because the specs were just too cool. Yet, I have already returned one and will be returning a second - read on to find out why.
The look and feel of the phone is actually pretty sleek, although they should have opted for an internal antenna at this point in the game. The SAR rating is decent, though (probably due to the fact the antenna protrudes), so I'm not complaining with the knowledge that I'm not getting as much radiation pumped into my body as I would with a Motorola phone. The buttons are all very easy to work with and the phone feels and looks very well-built.
The sound quality during calls is superb, and I have gotten great reception, so among its plethora of features the VX8300 still works well as a phone (shocking!).
Navigating through the phone's menu system is easy; however, I wouldn't recommend one of the display themes that make the menus animated - it just takes too damn long to scroll through the system.
The outer display is a little pixely for its time and could be better, and the inner display makes an incessant high-pitched noise that absolutely drives me nuts. The noise was the main reason I returned my first phone, because I have really sensitive ears and I constantly heard the sound from the display whenever the phone was to my face.
I did a search online to see if anyone else had this problem, and I couldn't find anyone else with it - so I brought the phone to a service center thinking it was just my original phone (which was ordered online). They replaced it with one from the store, but the noise from this phone is even worse! Did I just get two shoddy phones or is America deaf? If you own this phone, place the display against your ear in a quiet room - you tell me. I naturally hold the phone so my ear as at the top of the display (it is more comfortable for some reason) and every time I make a call I feel like I'm taking a grammer school hearing test. Also, the speakerphone is messed up on my replacement phone and it makes a tinny vibrating sound during calls that my first one didn’t; therefore, I’ll be taking this one back as well.
I purchased a microSD card when I ordered the phone to load it up with mp3s and save some money on an iPod, and generally the mp3 feature on the phone works great. My only complaints with the music player are as follows:
1. I had to manually change the accepted format from .wma to .mp3 in the secret menu by hitting the OK button, typing 0 and then entering all 0s for the service code, scrolling down to Music Setting and enabling .mp3s.
2. There is no way to jump to certain songs, so if you have a few hundred mp3s loaded like me, you have to scroll through them all to find the one you want.
3. If you are playing music, there is no way to access the menus and perform other tasks on the phone without exiting the music player.
Other than that, the audio is clear pending you have a decent headset, and even coming from the side speakers the sound quality is impressive.
All-in-all, the VX8300 is a sturdy phone with easy navigation, awesome features, and is outstanding for use as a telephone. If it weren't for the mosquito in my ear, the messed up speaker phone in my replacement, and a little more functionality with the music player, I would easily rate this phone a 9. -
"Just a great phone." on by clions3
Pros: Crystal clear interior screen, long battery life, good keypad, easy to use
Cons: Somewhat blurry exterior LCD screen, is prone to scratches but what phone isn't?
Summary: This is just a good, user-friendly phone.
Everyone's falling into the Razr-hype, and I did have the opportunity to purchase one, but instead I opted to pay $30 more and get this phone. All of my friends prefer this phone over the Razr, and I can see why.
First of all, you'll notice that this phone is somewhat "stylish". It gleams and isn't too bulky but it's not too small that you can barely dial a number.
The camera is decent. The flash is probably the best flash I've seen on a phone. If you turn on nightvision, wow! It burns my eyes, it's so bright.
Now, some people have been complaining about reception. My friends mostly have the LG VX5200 or the Motorola E815 and we all have the same amount of bars. Maybe it just depends on where you live, I'm not sure.
There are a lot of ways to personalize it too. I liked how you can change the way the menu is set-up. You can basically almost change any setting on this phone.
As for Verizon including "crappy ringtones", well all phones have those ringtones. Of course Verizon wants you to buy ringtones, why wouldn't they?
However, you can record a sound, send it to yourself, and save it as a ringtone as an alternate to buying ringtones.
All in all, it's a very good phone for its price. It's simple to use and has a great look and feel to it.Updated
So now I've this phone for a little over a month. It still works beautifully but I have dropped it twice.
Since it's a little on the bigger side, it tends to slide out of pockets. It looks a little dented up, but not too bad. However, since I've been so sick of dropping it and getting it scratched up, I looked online for hours for a cheap, good case. I found a great site: www.daydeal.com. They have great cases for a really good price, plus free shipping for all cell phone accessories.
I'm also thinking about buying the Vcast Pack, and a memory card for my phone, so I can listen to music. Still thinking about it, though. -
"This is a dream come true -- best phone I have ever owned!!" on by foreverLaur
Pros: loud, very customizeable, plays MP3's, great speakerphone, easy to navigate, good camera, easy to read screen, setup is fantastic, great phonebook, texting is easy, perfect reception, big keys, more!
Cons: T9 text is not default, but i couldn't find a single phone that had it defaulted. easy to switch though
Summary: This is the fourth cell phone I have had over the years. I've previously had Samsung, Nokia, and NEC.
LOOK
The phone is really nice. It's a dark grey color. Both screens are in color and everything is easy to read. It has large buttons that are easy to push, too.
RECEPTION/SERVICE
I recently spent the weekend traveling all over Ohio and I had great service everywhere. The phone connected every call quickly and never dropped a call. I receive every call and text message that is sent my way. Every caller is very clear and easy to hear. The reception is fantastic.
VOLUME
Every phone I have ever had or ever talked on, I always wished I could turn it up louder. The ringers were always too low even on max and the callers always seemed too quiet. On this phone, I have to turn the volume down to medium. If I turn it all the way up, I can still hear the caller loud and clear, I just need to hold the phone a foot away from my ear in order to avoid breaking it
. So I love the fact that the volume is loud. The ringtones are also super loud. I can hear it ringing in my bedroom when I'm in the basement or in my car when I've got the music blasting.
PHONEBOOK
New numbers are very easy to add. You can go to your contact list and add a new contact that way. You can type the number in like your going to dial it and save it that way. Or you can go to your call list (dialed, received, or missed) and save a number from there. You then type in the name, and you can save up to 5 numbers per entry. You can set a speed dial, a group, a ringtone, a picture, and a text messaging alert for each contact. You can type in a letter or a part of the name to access someone quickly. It takes just one click to get into your list of contacts.
TEXT MESSAGING
By default, it is set to Abc (I hate it, but every phone is). You can change it to Word (T9 predictive text), ABC, 123, or Symbols. Sending a new text and responding to a text is very simple and easy to use. You can also easily send pictures (and you can add sound to the pictures) or you can send a video clip. All are very easy to do. You can also send each text message to up to 10 different contacts. Quite nice if you want to send out a bulk message!!
CAMERA
It has a nice 1.3 megapixel camera. The pictures look pretty good for coming from a phone. You can change the shutter sound to: silent, normal shutter sound, ready 123, or say cheese! It has a self-timer and a flash. You can turn the flash on or off and it will remember your setting, you won't have to turn the flash on every time you want to use it. You can the option to save or erase any picture you take. The button to access the camera is on the right side of the phone. Press once for camera and twice for video. You can also adjust the white balance and the brightness as well as the resolution and color mode (color, sepia, b&w, negative, solari, vivid. There is also a night mode which you can set to on or off. And you can decide if you want the front screen to also act as a camera. Nice for taking self portraits! And its really easy to save, send, and erase every picture. When you go to view you pictures, they show up as tiny thumbnails so you don't have to deal with filenames and such, you can just see the picture. But you can rename them if you wish.
MUSIC
Yes, this phone can play MP3's. Verizon will tell you that you can only play Window's Media Player files because they like to try to scam you for money. Just go to menu, hit 0, enter all 0's for the service code, and scroll down to 11. Music Setting. In there, select MP3 Enable. Viola! I got the Music Essentials kit which comes with a USB cable to hook your phone to your computer, the software you need, and headphones to use with your phone (regular ones won't work). You can then upload MP3's onto your phone. It has a forward, backward, and play/pause button on the front. I haven't tried to use the MP3's as ringtones yet but that would be a very nice option.
RINGTONES
They suck. But if you don't care about ringtones, then no big deal. I really hope that you can put your MP3's on your phone and use them as ringtones. Or there are website out there that let you make your own ringtones from your own MP3's. I was too lazy and just paid the $2 a song for the stupid Verizon ones. But the three that I got all sound great!
CUSTOMIZATION
You can set the clock to multiple different ways. I set mine to digital because its really big and easy to read. The wallpapers aren't too bad either. I found one with bubbles getting big and little floating around and its pretty cool. You can also customize the menu. Mine is called "Pulse" and I love it. It looks really really neat. You can also change the color scheme.
So.. you can change the front wallpaper, main wallpaper, front clock, main clock, display themes, front banner, main banner, and big font/normal font. You can also change the power on/off sounds, alert sounds, and keypad volume. You can also have a different ringtone for caller ID, no caller ID, restricted calls, and all calls. Needless to say, you can basically customize the phone to look however you want.
BATTERY LIFE
I use my cell phone as an alarm, so I have it next to my bed everynight. So I just plug it in while I'm sleeping. I've never tried to let it go multiple days. But it has a full battery at night unless I spent the day taking tons of pictures/videos. I also have a car charger which is quite nice.
OTHER FEATURES
It has three separate alarm clocks, that you can set to go off just one time, to go off daily, to go off Mon-Fri, or just on the weekends. And you can set it to any ringtone. It has a calendar with reminders, a world clock, voice commands, a notepad, a calculator, an EZ Tip Calculator, security (password protected), customizeable shortcuts, and more!
CALLS
While on the phone, you can access basically everything on your phone. You can access your contact list and the menu. So I suppose you could send a text message while on the phone if you really wanted to! You can also record while on the phone and listen to it later. Or possibly send it as an attachment to a pix message.
SPEAKERPHONE
It is loud and easy to hear. I'll drive with the phone on my lap while chatting on speakerphone and I can hear the caller great and the caller can hear me great. It's a nice feature and there is a button on the phone to turn it on and off. An icon shows up on the bottom of both screens when speakerphone is on so you won't accidently have speakerphone on and not know it.
I basically spent countless hours researching every single phone Verizon had to offer. So many phones had so many complaints and this one seemed to have the least amount of them. We bought 4 of them, one of each person in our family, and I got my boyfriend one too. All 5 of us love the phones. The buttons are big and easy to push, the phone is very attractive, the reception is fantastic, the volume is very loud, and the phone is very simple to navigate while having a lot of cool features, including a nice 1.3 megapixel camera!! The removeable memory is also a nice feature, as well as buttons for the camera, volume up/down, and the voice commands!!
Don't waste time browsing other phones or trying out a cheapie -- they are no good, I've been there. Even my boyfriend (who is 24) and swore he'd never get a cell phone cuz he hated them loves it. -
"Voice Dial Destroyed - Outstanding LG Quality Otherwise" on by Zaphod B. Goode
Pros: Built like an M-1 Abrams tank; Stunning graphics theme options; Ergonomically flawless; Amazing battery life out-of-the-box.
Cons: User-recorded voice-matching eliminated in favor of text "recognition" matching; No camera lens cover; No redesign of the bizarre charge jack/plug.
Summary: I had traded in my old LG VX6000 for a Motorola Razr V3m, only to return the Razr in disgust three days later and swap for this VX8300, and the difference is nothing short of stunning. (You can read my rant on the shortcomings of the Razr V3m on that phone's page if you're into post-mortems.)
Everything that was wrong with the Razr - the awkward (and frankly cheap-looking) design and placement of the controls, the horrible battery life, the lack of a camera flash - are done flawlessly on the LG. The side buttons are located on the body, not the lid, which means they're easily accessible with one hand; the keypad buttons are "bumpy" enough to provide some tactile feedback; the speakerphone button is on the keypad where it should be, not on the side of the lid. I was flat-out amazed at the battery longevity of the LG compared with the Razr. With the latter, the thing would die after three or four hours of use. Though I assume that particular battery may just have needed the standard NiCad discharge/recharge breaking-in cycles to reach its full potential, the LG's battery, after I'd fully charged it, stayed at >full charge for three full days< before the first bar in the icon disappeared! The camera has an LED flash, and the photo quality rivals that of my 5.2 megapixel digital camera.
I would have liked a simple sliding cover to protect the lens - which another phone, I think the Samsung, has. Another minor problem is that if you put the leather case on the phone you have to detach the flap for the upper section before taking pix, because it gets in the way - but that's more the fault of the case design.
The two flubs that LG committed with this phone - for which I docked it two points - are the continued presence of a charger jack/plug that can only be described as weird, and, most consistently irritating, the willful destruction of the VX6000's excellent, functional, no-brainer-perfect-must-have voice dial.
DC power only requires two conductors - positive and negative - to function. For whatever bizarre reason, LG decided to go with a wide, flat connector/plug combination for its chargers, rather than a simple miniature single-prong jack and plug. The VX6000's had what appeared to be several thousand tiny conductors, which would cross and short, causing the fuse for my car's cigarette lighter to blow. The VX8300 has that same Weirdo Theater Frankenstein's Lab connector/plug combination, but I looked at it with an eye loupe and it looks like they've pared down the number of conductors to a mere six. It's working so far, but I dread the day when my car charger bites it and my ACC fuse gets blown yet again. I flatly refuse to contort myself into that tortured Cirque de Soleil mutation in order to reach my Honda's fuse panel ever again. At that point I'll just have to schlep my desk charger wherever I go. Fortunately, since the VX8300 battery apparently lasts forever this may not be much of a problem.
But the voice dial...! Ohboy. With the VX6000, when you entered a new contact name and number in the Contact list, you had the option of recording, with your own voice, the name into memory. The phone would prompt you for two spoken versions of the name, presumably to give it a range of tonal variance for more accuracy and less need to repeat.
When you wanted to call, you'd simply push the voice dial button at lower left, wait for the phone to say "Say a name...," then say the name. That was it. The phone would dial the number and you were off on your way.
For whatever reason, LG decided to dumb down its voice dial function to the level of other manufacturers, most notably the Razr, which has the identically-irritating setup.
Here's how it works now: You push the voice dial button. So far so good. The phone prompts, not for the name, but "Say a command..." You have to say "Call," or "Open the garage door," or "Take out the trash," or whatever other non-voice-dial function I'll never use but is nonetheless available.
After you've said "Call," the phone promts a second time, "Say a name or number." Like the Razr, you can't enter that name in your own voice at the time you enter the name and number into the Contacts list. Instead, the phone's electronics try - quite badly - to guess what the text you entered for that person's name should sound like. I don't know what bizarre algorithm is being used here, but not one of the contacts I have entered are pronounced in the way that algorithm thinks they should sound like. As I mentioned in the Razr review, a frequent contact is called "Berg" - which the automated voice dial thinks should be pronounced "Bearrje," in a nasally mechanized twang. For this name, and every single other one on my list (and they're fairly ordinary Joe-average names textually,) the phone invariably fails to match my voice with its interpretation of the text. It will ask "Did you say: ______?" After which you're presumably supposed to say "Yes" - which the voice match algorithm also fails to recognize.
After three or four repeats and "Voice recognition timed out" announcements, I generally have to bag it, go into Contacts, and just pick the name off the list.
So a big thumbs-down for this gigantic technological step >>backward<< for voice dial function.
For all practical purposes the voice dial feature has been eliminated from this phone - and others using the same idiotic system. Whoever thought it was a good idea to ditch the perfectly-functional user-recorded voice matching method, needs to be slapped. Hard.
Other than that essential correction for LG's successor to the VX8300, and hopefully a more conventional DC jack and plug, the VX8300 is phenomenal. The switch from the Razr to the LG was like going from a rental Chevy to a Lexus.
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