Am I Famous Now…

So Hills & Knowlton send me this esthetically designed LG Shine phone to test before the phone gets released in the UK on February 7th 2007. This is part of the LG Shine Blogger Relations Programm (Visit the LG Shine Blog).
I have decided I will use the phone as primary phone for around 10 days before sending it back and then reveal if I would/will buy the phone or wait for the LG Prada (picture courtesy of AVING Korea) with its marvelous black and white interface. And what other phone would fit black pin-striped suits better?

But maybe I should first tell you a little about my experience with cell phones. I actually don’t like mobile phones. I think they clutter my pockets next to my keys (some car keys are frigging big), my PDA and some more stuff. So far not one mobile phone could really satisfy me. Most of time because too many software has been cluttered on to the platform and the usability of the phone has majorly suffered under this. I would rather chose a phone on usability than on design, but not one platform could convince me last years, so design has been decisive most of time in the last 3 years.

What do I expect from a mobile phone? Actually nothing more than making phone calls and manage my contacts, but if I could chose :

• I love black, so black would be my preference
• Decent contact and email synchronization software
• A perfect navigation. I should be able to blindly find everything, especially after having had many cell phones since 1994. Yes, my first one was a Motorola. Remember those phones with the double-sized battery? I had one of them already.
  A blind person should be able to find everything easily if the phone would be equipped with special navigation tonalities. Everything should be THAT simple
• Bluetooth for easy synchronization with my computer (mail server software). I don’t look for the best looking software, but for the best software. Years long I have been using TheBat! and if Gmail will finally roll out the mail fetcher, Gmail and Gmail Mobile perfectly do the job for me today
• A decent browser, with flash integration. Opera Mini comes to mind here. Of course Java needs to be a recent version as well.
• Wi-Fi and Skype (unless together with a data pack I could have a worldwide flat rate for the same price as a national flat rate)
• A RSS aggregator. Geek can dream.

Correct, build me a decent smartphone and I will live in my phone. But I did not ask for one of those fugly actual smartphones that have invaded the market lately. Design IS important to me. It is like women, you don’t have to be a beauty queen, but I should not be ashamed to show up somewhere with you. ;-)

So what phone has come closest to my dreams over the last years?
No phone has. My two favorite models still are the Siemens S45 because the contact manager was exactly what I needed in those days and I liked the looks of it, but the phone I still swoon over is the Nokia 6210. I loved the sleek design and Nokia PC Suite 6.2 perfectly did the job for me. Bluetooth was a great addition at that time. And it had Snake 2. :D
If Palm and [Sony] Clie would have continued developing the (European version with Bluetooth) of the TH55 into a platform with a recent Java implementation, and a sleeker, more modern looking platform this would be the perfect deal for me. Especially when a phone would slip into it.

You get it, the looks of the LG Prada point in the Clie direction and you can bet I am following that phone closely. But enough of jabber, on to the first impressions of the LG Shine OS. ;-)

“Finally!”, I hear you say. Trust me you won’t be disappointed about the voyage, because I will tell you my honest opinions after having played with the phone for almost an hour, but before I switch to the LG phone as main phone for the next days.
So keep in mind that I do expect the impossible, the thing we haven’t seen yet. I expect a revolution!

Hey you did ask me to review that phone!

The first thing to do after having assembled the phone, is to turn it on. This is not possible without sliding the phone open!? Bad start IMHO.
Lets close the slider again and have a play with the 5 buttons under the screen. 5 push buttons, the middle one, with scroll wheel function.

The left, blue back lit, button brings me in the main menu. But also the push function of the scroll wheel brings me there. Same story for the right back lit button and the button left of the scroll wheel, both lead to my contact list. Why this double navigation?
The button right of the scroll wheel leads to the (configurable) Favorites Menu.
Luckily the main menu is marvelous. Brilliantly aliased fonts, nice icons and the scroll wheel offers me a great way to navigate. I would love to be able to configure those buttons. Hopefully LG has integrated this option.

On the right side of the phone we find the 2MP camera button, direct access to the MP3 Player, volume control buttons and the connector for as well the charger, the USB connection as the head phones. The cover of this connector is extremely fragile and I expect this one to break within the first month of usage unless you are really carefully. Last would mean that you can’t stick the phone in your pockets when listening to music.
A longer push (around 2 seconds) activates the camera. The camera takes great pictures. As well the scroll wheel as the camera button on the side let you take pictures. A great phone camera, but still two things annoy me. Three actually.

1. Why do I have to open the slider to turn off the camera? Or did I miss a function?
2. The phone needs to be flipped to watch the menu, which is in landscape version. This is a major annoyance
3. There is no direct/visual indication that both buttons next to the scroll wheel serve as navigation to select the options in the camera submenus.

I think it should not be too hard for LG to work at those annoyances and improve them with a software update/firmware.
Personally I would love to see the possibility to be able to flip the screen once the slider is opened. This surely would make online browsing and a mobile YouTube version a lot of fun on this brilliant screen.

A last thing I couldn’t understand is that although I can browse my contacts without opening the slider, I can’t make a phone call without opening the slider. Here I think LG could have been more modern. Especially since both buttons left and right of the scroll wheel have no function when browsing the contact list. This would majorly have improved the usability of this phone

I bet now you think I hate this phone, don’t you? Well let me tell you I don’t. Actually I did expect that this would happen. I did not expect to find the perfect phone, but I can still dream of it. And share what I think the perfect phone will be. Now 10 days of heavy usage of the LG Shine will follow, before I will decide if those little annoyances will make me hate the LG Shine or if I can get used to them and love this brilliantly designed mobile phone.
In those days I will take pictures with the phone, upload them to my flickr set, use the phone as Internet Browser and regularly check mail. I think I might somewhere have a microSD memory card to upgrade the standard 45 MB internal storage to 1GB and use the phone as a media player. Lg Shine Blog, please tell me there is a lock on the memory in our pre-release version. 1GB is a kick-a$$ feature!
I will install third party software and games and many more. A great bonus is that BubbleSoccer is already installed. Some might now this game as Frozen Bubble (in *NIX). And you bet this is going to sweeten up many meetings.
And I surely will take the phone to the local cocktail lounge.² ;-)
I think the next update will be on Sunday or Monday and then we will have a look at the 2MP Camera, the MP3 player and other multimedia features of the LG Shine phone.

So far I can tell you I actually am pretty happy with the phone and its design.
If my contract were to expire today and I could chose for the LG Shine, I would.

Download the software Package for the LG Shine here

Disclaimer : This is a free review part of my LG Shine series. In this series of reviews I only express my own opinion. I have absolutely no obligation to LG or Hills & Knowlton other than to return the LG Shine phone.

¹ Pictures are courtesy of the flickr members of the LG Shine Users Flickr Group.
² Ouch!