This phone does it all! I love it!
Written: Jun 22 '07 (Updated Jun 28 '07)
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Pros: Reception, video, Music Player, Camera, hi-res LCD's
Cons: 2.5mm headphone jack, no data cable or flash memory included, no PC software
The Bottom Line: A miracle of modern technology!!
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| thrasher32's Full Review: LG CU500 |
Time for an upgrade
I've been with AT&T (which changed to Cingular, then back to AT&T) for years now, and my old LG phone (don't remember the model number) was due for an upgrade. I really liked my last LG phone, which was just a basic phone with no camera, music player, video, 3G etc etc. Basic, but it worked great and never failed me.
With my new phone I knew I wanted, at the very least, a camera and an Music Player. I browsed AT&T's phones, narrowed down the field, and the last phone standing was the LG CU500v. Reasons for exclusion from my short list were: too bulky (PDA's), lack of features (all the Motorolas), bad reviews, "candy bar" style phone design (candy bar bad, flip phone good), and price.
LG CU500v Physical Design
The body design is the flip-phone format, which - as I previously alluded to - I prefer. Flip-phones just seem cooler (to me), and "candy bar" phones seem so small in my hand and feel weird (to me, again) to use. The CU500v is about the same width and length as a Motorola Razr V3, but a little thicker. The phone I have is jet black, and I didn't see any color options listed when I ordered it. I would have ordered black anyway so that's ok.
On the outside of the phone is a small (1" I believe) TFT LCD screen which displays the date and time by default, as well as a background which you can change. When a call comes in, the outside LCD displays the name and picture (if you set one) of the caller (if known), or the number (if no name data is sent). When your call is over, the call time is displayed. While in Music Player mode, the outside LCD displays the visualization, and scrolls the artist and track information across the bottom. The outside LCD has a resolution of 96x96 pixels and displays up to 65,000 colors and 6 lines of text.
Just below the outside LCD are the Music Player operation buttons. The three buttons, from left to right are Previous Track/Rewind, Play/Pause, and Next Track/Fast Forward. Putting these buttons on the outside of the phone was a great idea and makes using the Music Player a breeze.
On the left side of the phone, from top to bottom, there is a 2.5mm headphone jack (more on this in the Music Player section), up/down volume controls, and a third button whose function varies depending on what the phone is doing.
The bottom of the phone houses the data cable/charger connector.
The battery (Li-ion 1100 mAh) is located on the back of the phone. The SIM card is located underneath the battery, and the Micro-SD card slot is located at the top of the battery compartment, requiring the user to remove the battery to swap out the Micro-SD card. The battery is rated at up to 5 hours of talk time, and 10 days of standby time.
Opening the phone, from the top down, we have the stereo speakers at the top, a large-ish (2.5"??) LCD screen with a resolution of 176x220 pixels, which is capable of displaying up to 65,000 colors and 11 lines of text.
The hinge of the phone houses the rotatable lens for the 1.3 megapixel camera. The lens rotates 180 degrees, handy for taking self-portraits! The lens itself is slightly recessed in the hinge, protecting it from fingerprints and damage.
Moving to the bottom half of the phone, we have 2 function keys on both the left and right of the phone, and a function circle with center button between them.
Below the circle and function buttons are the numeric keypad, along with the green call-answer and red call-end keys. Below the keypad is a small microphone hole and a pad so you don't break the phone if it gets slammed shut.
LG CU500v Features
The LG CU500v has GOT to be the most full-featured cellphone out there today, it seems like it does everything but park my car for me. For this reason, I'm breaking the features section into functional categories...
Phone
As a cell phone, the LG CU500v is quite well endowed. It basically handles all of the cellular broadcast formats in use in the United States, including GSM, GPRS, and EDGE at 850/900/1800/1900 megahertz - Quad Band in other words.
Data transmission protocols supported are GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, and HSDPA. Maximum data speed is 1.8Mbps, which is pretty darned fast for a cellphone.
Cellular signal reception is excellent, and calls are clear and loud through the handset, and the speaker phone - full duplex BTW - functionality is equally excellent. The phone sounds so good on calls compared to my last phone that at first I didn't recognize people's voices. I've been told that call clarity on the other end is excellent as well. This phone is capable of making two separate calls at the same time, which is kind of cool, although I've had no use for it as of yet.
The phone book can hold up to 500 contacts, each with up to 5 numbers, 2 email addresses and a picture ID. There are 9 speed-dial slots, the first one is hardwired for voicemail, but the other 8 are user-configurable.
One thing that's kind of annoying is that you can't set your ringtone to a stored MP3. Ringtones have a size limit, which every song will exceed. You can, however, use a audio editor on your PC to edit an MP3 down to the correct size, download it to your phone, and use THAT as a ringtone. Yes, it's a pain, but that's the way it works.
Music Player
The Music Player function of the phone is excellent. The only gripe I have is that all the wired headphones I've used with the phone do not have the kind of volume I would like. For this reason I bought wireless bluetooth stereo headphones, which have their own power and volume controls. I have the Sony-Ericsson HBH-DS970 bluteooth hands-free/stereo headphones, which are excellent. I tried at least 4 different sets of wired headphones (none satisfactory) and 3 sets of bluetooth headphones (uncomfortable/not loud enough/poor sound quality) before deciding on the Sony-Ericsson's. My heartfelt advice is just use a good set of bluetooth wireless headphones and you'll be very happy.
Update: My stereo bluteooth headphone reviews are complete, you can find them here:
Motorola S9: http://www.epinions.com/content_381657583236
Motorola HT820: http://www.epinions.com/content_381660794500
Sony-Ericsson HBH-DS970: http://www.epinions.com/content_381684321924
Oh, did I mention the 2.5mm headphone jack problem? The problem is that 99% of the MP3 players out there use an 1/8 (3.5mm) stereo headphone jack, with 2 connection points (rings) on the jack itself - the 2 connections are for the left and right channels. This phone requires a 3-connection (3-ring) connector - two connections for the left and right stereo signal, and a third for the phone functions. You can get a 2-ring adapter to go from a 3.5mm plug to a 2.5mm plug, but if it doesn't have 3 connections (and none of them that I could find do), you will only get MONO sound, not stereo! **NOTE: what I mean by "rings" are the insulating rings on the actual plug. These are black rings that circle the plug. If there are 2 rings you will only get mono sound. 3 rings and you get stereo sound.
I strongly advise you to just buy the stereo bluetooth headphones and you'll save yourself a lot of hassle. They cost more, but you can use them with any bluetooth music player, including your computer, if it is bluetooth capable. You can also buy an adapter for your iPod that will allow you to use your bluetooth headphones with it.
The sound from the MP3 player is excellent. The MP3 player has a number of visualizations that play on both LCD's and five preset equalizer settings. You can create playlists and play all of your songs or certain playlists in random order, and a repeat function.
As mentioned above, there are dedicated MP3 player buttons on the outside of the phone, which are very handy and allow you to start, stop, pause, and navigate your music without opening the phone. There's also a dedicated music button on the left side of the keypad.
The Music Player supports files in MP3, WMA, AAC, and AAC formats.
I'll get to removable storage for all your music and pictures in a minute....
Camera
The camera has 1.3 megapixels of resolution, and will take pictures at a maximum resolution of 1280x960. Other selectable resolutions are 640x480, 320x240, and 168x120.
The camera is also capable of recording video at 15fps at resolutions of 176x144 (14 minutes max) or 320x240 (5 minutes max). The video format used is 3GP.
The camera is capable of 4x zoom in picture mode and 2x zoom in video mode. It should be noted that zoom is NOT available at the highest camera resolution (1280x960).
Camera mode is accessed through a dedicated button on the right side of the keypad.
This phone is video-share capable as well, although I have not had the chance to use it as of yet. Video share basically turns your phone into a video phone if the person on the other end of your call also has a video share capable phone. Pretty cool if it works!
Other camera features include adjustable shutter tones, white balance, and color effects, a built in image editor, a multi-shot mode where you can take up to 9 pictures in quick succession, and a self-timer which can be set to a 3, 5 or 10 second delay.
Picture quality is good but not great. The phone takes good pictures when the lighting is sufficient, but it doesn't do a very good job in darker environments, and there's no flash. Comparing picture quality to my wife's Razr V3, the Razr takes better pictures, and does better in darker settings, but the LG has a rotating lens, which the Razr does not. All in all the camera function is quite adequate for my needs. I wouldn't use this for your main digital camera though.
Multimedia and Internet
The LG CU500v supports 3G data streaming which means you can watch TV (MobiTV) or listen to the radio (MobiRadio) over your phone. These are NOT free services, however, they will cost you about $10 each per month. You can also watch video clips, which are free - assuming you pay for a data package - more on that in a moment.
MusicID is a very cool feature. Basically, if you hear a song playing on your car radio, TV, or whatever, you can put the phone in MusicID mode, and it will try and determine what song it is, and give you the option to download (read:BUY) it to your phone. I haven't used this feature, as most commercial music that I hear on the radio/tv is worthless to me, but if it works as advertised, MusicID would be one sweet feature for a lot of people.
The LG CU500v supports multiple Instant Messenger services, including AOL, MSN, Yahoo, and ICQ.
Of course the phone will connect to the internet, but this is a cellphone, not a PDA, so don't expect web pages to be rendered in anything except mobile format. The online speed is great, but as with any mobile device, typing in URL's and passwords using the numeric keyboard gets old fast. If it's the only internet connection you have though, it definitely comes in handy.
As a side-note for all you Gmail users, Google has a Java application that allows you to access your Gmail account directly. It's a free download.
Obviously this phone is fully capable of sending text messages, if you're into that. The editor does the T9 guessing game pretty well without being too annoying. You can attach pictures and video to your text messages as well.
The LG CU500v is Java 2.0 compatible for all you mobile gamers and application geeks out there.
Now, for the catch: All this data streaming video and audio, as well as internet access is great, but as I mentioned, it is not free. Typically, if you do not subscribe to a multimedia package from your carrier, data transmission will cost you 1-2c per kilobyte. This will add up REAL FAST if you're watching video or listening to streaming audio. Sooo, if you want to use these features, you really, REALLY need to buy a data package. The cheapest no-limit data package that AT&T offers is $19.95 a month. That may seem steep (and it is), but if you have a family plan, with multiple phones, that data plan covers all your phones, so it could be a really good deal, depending on who is using what data in your family.
Tools and Miscellaneous
The LG CU500v has a whole slew of tools, including a calculator, calendar, alarm, notepad, task list, tip calculator, world clock, stop watch, unit converter and stopwatch. I won't pretend I've used all of these, but the calculator, calendar, and alarm clock are all well designed and easy to use.
The LG CU500v also has a "flight mode" which turns off the cell phone transmitter/receiver, but still allows you to use the phone as an MP3 player or use the tools.
It's also "multitasking", which means you can use data and voice simultaneously. Neat.
Mass Storage
The LG CU500v has a slot for a Micro-SD flash memory card. A Micro-SD is about the size of my pinky-fingernail, and at the time of this writing, 2GB was the maximum data capacity available. ACTUAL space on a 2GB card is 1.8 GB.
The LG CU-500v does NOT come with a Micro-SD card, you'll have to buy one yourself.
The Micro-SD slot is located in the battery compartment, at the top, right under the battery latch. You'll need a pen or some other small object to insert and remove the Micro-SD card. The slot is spring-loaded. Putting the slot in the battery compartment means that if you have more than one Micro-SD card, you'll need to turn the phone off and remove the battery to swap cards. It would have made more sense to put the slot on the side of the phone.
A 2GB Micro-SD card holds approximately 650 3.5mb MP3 files (average size of MP3Pro MP3 files recorded at 96khz). Not bad, but I'll be quite happy if 4GB cards come out soon.
You can also store other data on the card, and move your pictures there as well, of you're getting short on phone memory.
So, you're probably wondering how you get the data onto the Micro-SD card, right? Well, there's a data cable that you can buy (yes, it should have been included, but it is not), or if you have a multi-card reader on your PC, you can just pop the Micro-SD card into it's adapter (included when you buy the card) and read and write to it using your computer. You need a computer either way, so if you have the multi-card reader, save your money and just use it to load your data onto the flash card.
It should definitely be noted that there is no software for the phone, it just looks like a drive on your computer when you're connected via data cable or are using the card reader. So, what I did was just created folders on the Micro-SD card called "MUSIC", "PICTURES", and "VIDEO", and dropped/stored my files in the appropriate folders. The phone looks at the contents of the entire card for any recognized file formats: ie MP3, WMA, etc.
At this time you can get a Micro-SD 2GB card online for about $25. Or if you're impatient (like me), you can go to your favorite electronics retailer and get one for about $45. I've read on the forums that the CU500v has some issues with some brands of Micro-SD cards, so my recommendation is to use only SanDisk cards, since I know that brand works in my phone.
Epilogue
Wow, my hands are tired now. I warned you that this phone had a lot of features, right? Bottom line is that I really love this phone, it does all that I want and much, MUCH more. The best part? It only cost me $29 to replace my old phone with this one, albeit I had to sign a 2 year contract to get the discount. This phone costs well over $300 with no discounts.
I highly recommend this phone. If you can find a more fully-featured phone for that price, I'd like to know about it.
Whew, I need a nap now. Head hurt....
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 29
Recommended for: Professionals On-the-Go - Internet and Email is a Must!
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Epinions.com ID:
thrasher32
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Location: Indianapolis, IN, USA
Reviews written: 97
Trusted by: 19 members
About Me:
Old-school headbanger/guitarist/programmer/electronics nut with an itchy writing hand...
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