LG Lyric MT375 review (red, MetroPCS)

The Lyric's 2.0-megapixel camera can take pictures in six resolutions and three quality settings. Other settings include night mode, a 10x digital zoom, a brightness adjustment, four white balance settings, a self-timer, a multishot mode, and four shutter tones plus a silent option. The camcorder can shoot clips in two resolutions and offers a similar set of editing options. Clips for multimedia messages are capped at 15 seconds, but you can shoot for as long as an hour if you like.

Photo quality was about the same as on LX 370, though perhaps slightly better. As before, images are a tad dark, but colors were relatively natural and there wasn't too much image noise. Videos were mediocre, however. The Lyric has 42MB of user-accessible memory, and the microSD slot can accommodate cards up to 16GB.

The basic music player supports MP3 and AAC files. Features are slim, though you do get album art, playlist support, and shuffle and repeat modes. You also can send the music player to the background while using other functions and the airplane mode turns off the Lyric's transmitter for listening to tunes while flying. Fortunately, loading music on the phone is easy using a USB cable or memory card.

Performance
We tested the dual-band (CDMA 800/1900) Lyric in San Francisco using MetroPCS service. Call quality was quite satisfactory. Conversations were clear with no static or interference, and we didn't detect any distortion in the voice quality. The volume was sufficiently loud, and even though we had some difficulty in very noisy places, we were pleased with the experience.

Callers also reported few problems. They could tell that we were using a cell phone and a few friends mentioned the background noise issue, but that was the only complaint we heard. Speakerphone calls were fine. There was an echo sound at the highest volumes so we tended to keep the audio at the middle levels to avoid the distortion. In those instances, however, we had to be close to the phone if we wanted to hear. Bluetooth calls were satisfactory and we didn't have trouble with automated systems.

The Lyric has a rated battery life of 3.3 hours talk time and 16 days standby time. In our tests, the Lyric had a talk time of 2 hours and 55 minutes. According to FCC radiation tests, the Lyric has a digital SAR of 1.23 watts per kilogram.