It looks like Rogers is starting to pickup more Android devices, and why not add the new LG Eve to that list. This is a touchscreen smartphone with all the smartphone capabilities, however it looks a lot like the LG Xenon that was released a while back, but the size and style of it in general doesn’t stand out to many smartphone consumers.
Features & Pricing
The new LG Eve will run you for about $49.99 on a 3 year voice & data contract or $399.99 for just the phone on Rogers.Features include a fairly decent 3 inch screen, a 5 megapixel camera with LED flash, Face Recognition app, GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, and 3.5G 7.2mbps data speeds. The Eve has 150mb of built in memory but also includes a 2gb MicroSD card, expandable up to16gb. You’ll find a large slide out qwerty keyboard as well a touchscreen which isn’t the best but gets the job done.
Design
The design of the LG Eve looks very nice with the glossy front touchscreen and grey color combination. There are three dedicated Home, Menu and Back buttons on the front of the phone. The Home and Back buttons are actually touch sensitive which are quite annoying because sometimes you accidentally tap it. The build quality is quite sturdy and the slide out keyboard is very well built with no looseness.
The Eve weighs about 139g which is quite comfortable and isn’t to heavy in the pocket. The top of the phone you’ll find the 3.5mm headphone jack as well as the Power/Lock, Unlock button. The left of the phone has the MicroUSB port and the volume rocker and the right has a dedicated camera and music key along with the MicroSD card slot.
Interface
The LG Eve runs Android firmware 1.5 specifically designed for social networking. The main menu has changed quite a bit from the two original Android phones (HTC Magic and Dream) that had the basic slide up menu. To access the menu, you press the menu button on the main screen which has been setup as a permanent icon. From there you’ll find the main menu which shows categories sorted by Rogers, Communication, Multimedia, Utilities, Google, and Downloads. It’s fairly simple to slide up and down and most of the applications are still the same as the other Android devices. The notification bar on the top is still there and is easily accessed by sliding it down to reveal your notifications as well as the ability to turn on and off Bluetooth and WiFi.
Social Network
Rogers has made this phone specifically for those who love to keep in touch in anyway possible. They have included a Windows Live Messenger application as well as Yahoo Messenger. Both these apps can run in the background and any messages you receive will show up on the notification bar.
The LG Eve features a special application called SNS Manager which brings together Facebook, Twitter and Bebo networks into one place, letting users check status updates in real time. You can now setup other email accounts including Rogers, Yahoo, Telus, and many other email providers listed.
Dialing & Call Quality
The dialing keypad is a bit different from the other Android devices. It’s quite simple and nothing to fancy. I would rather have a physical send and end key instead.
Call quality is loud and very clear but unfortunately, there isn’t always signal. I seem to have a hard time making calls while in my basement because of low to no bars at all. Speaker-phone isn’t that great either because it echo’s quite often on the other line.
Camera Quality & Battery Life
The LG Eve has a decent 5 megapixel camera. I found some pictures to show up quite bad in low lights, even with the LED flash. But when outside in daylight, you’ll find pictures to show up quite well but not as vibrant as expected for a 5 megapixel camera. Colors seemed to be washed out and photos sometimes come out grainy which is quite annoying. The Eve has a decent video camera and is quite fast, but sometimes choppy at points when viewing and the quality isn’t the greatest either.
Battery Life I must say is quite bad. I’m not sure why but for some reason, the three Android phones that we have reviewed from Rogers have all had about the same battery life. I could barely go 8 hours of normal use (WiFi & Bluetooth Off). This phone is definitely something that has to be charged daily, and if you find that a problem. You’ll definitely have to lug around some sort of charger or extra battery.
Photo Examples:
Conclusion
While LG tries to make this a smartphone. I just don’t see how it can be. With the small touchscreen which is quite hard to press, to the slowness of navigating around menus, to even the battery life just doesn’t make me say that this is the phone that business users want or should have. That being said, I would definitely recommend this phone to teens of younger age as a first smartphone because of the all the social networking applications crammed into this phone but if your expecting your daughter/son to keep this phone for 3 years. I wouldn’t recommend it.
