Not too many phones can wow us in these days, especially if it is not tricked out of a smartphone or multimedia touch screen wonder. However, shining the LG and DLite dazzled his way into our inner adolescent heart. More Korean cousins are very similar than any of his American brothers and sisters, it is totally DLite girly in every way, with flashing lights, pastel colors and cartoonish wallpaper. Its features are not earth shattering by any means – there is a 2.0-megapixel camera, music player, threaded messaging, a social networking application, and a few other basics – but the charm and humor of phone’s design has impressed us in the end. If we were in our tweens, we would totally ask our parents to us this phone.
Design
There is no question that LG designed the DLite to appeal to a very feminine sensuality. In fact, it feels as if it belongs in a Barbie dream house or in the hands of a Disney princess. It comes in either a bright pink bubble gum or a pastel sky blue on the outside while the inside is a creamy white. At 4.3-inches long and 2.0 cm wide and 0.6 inches thick, the DLite surprisingly long time for a flip phone, and could be great for young hands. It has very sharp straight sides with a slight curve upwards and downwards. Weighing 3.5 ounces, it still felt pretty solid in our hands, despite its plastic construction.
If the phone is in standby mode, you will not see any type of display on the outside of the phone, the LG and T-Mobile branding. If you activate it, however, either by opening the phone or by pressing a button, you will be a horizontal LED matrix display remarkable hidden underneath. It displays the current time by default, but it also shows caller ID in a scrolling animation. You can also have other LED animations as well as the stick figure of a Space Invaders-style video game or dance. You also get animations for new messages or to let you know the music player is active. We found these LED animations amusing and entertaining, but we want only for a few more external controls, particularly for the music player.
The hotel is located right at the end of the DLite the outside, just under the T-Mobile branding, is what appears to be bent piece of transparent plastic. However, if you activate the phone, you will find that it is indeed a unique Edge-lit LED surface, which LG calls “Secret lighting”. It appears four LEDs in the phone’s edge, which illuminates the plastic, which are embedded in a very nice bright light. The “Secret Lighting” is activated only when you first open or close the phone and if there is an incoming call or message. You can use this “Secret Lighting” in one of five different patterns of display – light distribution, light gathering, Flowing Light (from left to right), Flowing Light (from right to left) or light all – and in one of seven colors.
The advantage of such a long phone is that you get a very large display. On the inside is a 2.8-inch display that a bit bigger than it looks because of its length. It has a 240×400 pixel resolution screen that blessed 262.144 colors that can display sharp and vivid images in results. You can select the brightness, backlighting time and the style for both, and menu fonts.
BUY LG DLITE PHONE NOW WITH DISCOUNT!
But what really catches our eye with the display is its utterly unique interface. In fact, the graphics and icons unlike anything we’ve seen before in a phone. The wallpaper, menu styles, and icons seem to have the custom with whimsical illustrations that remind us of children’s books and craft rather stationary. For example, the default font is designed to look like it is handwritten, and the standard dial-sewn cloth look like digits. You get a static array of eight and six animated wallpapers to choose from, and some of the animated wallpapers have clocks and calendars, to change the date and time.
Below the screen are the controls for navigation, the switch from a round and a central OK button, two soft keys, a browser button and a Task Manager button, all around there as well. The toggle doubles as shortcuts to the recent call history, a new audio-postcard, mobile back-up and a new SMS. In standby mode, the middle OK key to T-Mobile MyFaves interface, add your favorite contacts.
Right below the buttons for send, are back, end power, and the number buttons, all separated in rows of three. Each line is in a curved oval shape, and although the buttons are clear, they feel a little flush with the surface of the phone. However, they were far enough apart that we have arranged dial and text without too many errors.
On the left side of the phone is the volume rocker that feels very thin, and the same goes for the camera button on the right side of the spine. Also on the right side is the charger headset jack, while the lens of the camera is on the back. You have to remove the battery cover on the microSD card slot access. We wanted there was a 3.5 mm headset jack, since the phone has a music player. We also found the placement of the camera a bit problematic. Since the phone does not act on an external display as a viewfinder, you must use the main screen to see the photo you take. This presents a problem because the lens of the camera and the main display is not consistent with each other, so you have to guess at the correct position to hold the phone.
Like the Samsung Gravity T, the DLite also has a “etiquette pause” or, as LG calls it, “Motion Mute”. With the internal phone memory, the accelerometer DLite automatically mute incoming calls or alarms, when you switch on the phone. This is useful to silence the phone during a meeting, or only when you wake up in the morning.
Features
The LG has DLite a 1,000-entry phone book with room for each entry in two numbers, an e-mail address, a messenger ID, a web address, company name, address, a birthday, an anniversary, and a memo. As always, you can add a contact to a caller group, pair it with a photo or image, and with the DLite, you can sound the all contact with a polyphonic 35 ringtones and text message. You can also add your own MP3s as ringtones. You can also contact any one of 12 different LED-matrix animations, as well as their own “Secret Lighting” pattern.
BUY LG DLITE PHONE NOW WITH DISCOUNT!
Other Mobile Essentials include a vibrate mode, a speakerphone, an alarm clock, a calendar, a notepad, a calculator, a world clock, a task list, a stopwatch, a tip calculator, and a unit converter. Other advanced features include voice commands, stereo Bluetooth, T-Mobile Web2go mobile web browser and instant messaging. You can also send audio postcards that voice messages are sent with a framed photo. Of course, you also receive SMS and MMS, which is conveniently organized by threaded discussions. For e-mail, you can either AOL, Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo Mail as your e-mail provider, or go your own way by entering your ISP POP3 or IMAP4 server settings. There are GPS devices with the DLite, plus location-based applications like TeleNav, Google Maps, and where. How many T-Mobile phones these days, the DLite Buzz also has a social application that designed to meet all your social networks like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace in an interface is home. You need only your login information and can then be riding through your various social networks and get quick status updates in a mostly text-only interface.
The DLite has a music player, and you can upload songs via a USB cable or microSD card. The player interface is fairly straightforward. You can repeat or shuffle songs, create playlists and edit, and you can select from four preset equalizer settings. There is also a visualizer, when you add your music listening experience feel like, and you can minimize the player in the background as well. Another option is a nice conversation YouTube application to the phone.
The DLite has a 2-megapixel camera, the pictures in four resolutions and three quality settings, five white balance presets, and four color effects (with an option for none) can take. Other settings are a night mode, a timer, brightness, and a shot mode. There is also a camcorder that can record 320×240 or 176×144 in each pixel resolutions. After a photo, you can save it or send it via MMS, Bluetooth, e-mail or an online album (Flickr, Photobucket, Snapfish, Kodak and the telephone instructions). Unfortunately, the picture quality was pretty dismal. Not only does it suffer in low light, but its colors looked dull, dull, and had an overall reddish color. The video quality was not much better, they were choppy and pixelated for the most part.
Apart from the beautiful wallpaper, with the phone, the LG DLite with your own graphics or sounds, if you wish. You can download games and apps from the T-Mobile store to download and in fact, a few that get to come to the phone. These include demo versions Pac-Man Ms. Pac-Man, Guitar Hero 5 mobile, Bejeweled, and Where’s Waldo. You also get full versions of Bubble Bash 2 Mobile and Photobucket.
Performance
We tested the LG DLite in San Francisco with T-Mobile. The phone is the quality was very impressive. On our side we did not hear that cause static or interference, and the people at the other end sounded sharp and clear. His call volume was good too. The voice quality sounded a bit harsh, but nothing extraordinary. When we first called our callers, they said they could hardly tell we were on a cell phone. They did not hear any static or background noise, and said that we sounded just as we called them on a landline. Calls made with his kit was well received, as well. For us, our caller sounds a little tinny and echo-heavy, but that’s pretty standard for most car kits. Our callers said we sounded good and of course on the speakerphone.
The audio playback of music has the DLite acceptably well over the phone tiny speakers, but it was still very thin and tinny on the whole. While we wanted the phone had a 3.5 mm headset jack, the DLite comes with a wired headset that plugs into the Micro-USB connector, and you can use a stereo Bluetooth headset. We would certainly be the headset for listening to music, if possible.
We were pleased to see that the DLite support for 3G network from T-Mobile, which we found nice and fast. We invited YouTube video with only 4 seconds of buffering, if the video quality was terrible pixelated and blocky. CNET mobile site in 11 seconds to load, and loaded BBC mobile website in just 8 seconds. The LG has a rated battery life of DLite 5.5 hours of talk time and 15 days standby time. We were tested with the DLite’s talk time of 6 hours and 1 minute impressed. According to FCC radiation tests, the DLite a digital SAR of 0.67 watts per kilogram.
BUY LG DLITE PHONE NOW WITH DISCOUNT!
