Today I picked up a phone for my dad at the post office, and now I’m playing with it before I restore it to factory settings again. It’s something like a Nokia Asha, just from LG 😀 The phone has 6 dedicated buttons; 3 are touch-sensitive and the rest are hardware buttons. The touch buttons are on the front and they are: answer call, back, and end call.
The hardware buttons are as follows: on the left side there is the volume control, and on the right side a button that turns the screen on/off or, in certain situations, locks/unlocks it. While a page is loading in Opera Mini, none of the controls work – only the power button locks or unlocks the display, which is indicated in the top right corner of the screen, and the end call button, which makes the phone ask whether you want to quit Opera Mini entirely.
Oh, so it turns out I just had to swipe my finger across the display, and that made the progress bar fill up. When loading the second page, it didn’t ask me for anything like that anymore. The phone doesn’t detect tilting. That means most of the time you’re stuck in portrait mode whether you like it or not. Only when you choose, while typing, that you want to enter text in landscape mode (a la full keyboard), will the phone switch to landscape every time it asks you to enter some text, and then switch back once you’re done. In my opinion, this is the phone’s Achilles’ heel and its biggest flaw and shortcoming.
One thing is certain, though: the internet on it is not very usable, much like on cheap Androids. The problem is that while everything on cheap Androids is unbearably slow but working, here with Opera Mini 7.1 written in Java everything is not only slow but also broken! I tried 2 speed testers to see how fast the internet runs. According to the specs on Heureka, the phone should support at most 2.5G networks, so-called EGSM, which I think means classic EDGE. Pages load quickly. The phone doesn’t indicate anywhere whether I’m connected to mobile data or to WiFi, but I haven’t entered a WiFi password into the phone yet, so it can’t be connected to WiFi.
First I tried rychlost.cz. As you already know, the page loaded very quickly. I press the “Download only” button and the page just reloads with no result. I click “New version of the tester (work in progress)” several times in a row – because when I click the checkbox, nothing happens. I want to see how checkboxes behave when they don’t have text assigned to them – web developers surely know <label for="..." />. So every time I click a <label for="..." />, the page reloads and most of the time the box doesn’t get checked anyway.
When I finally managed to check the box next to “New version of the tester (work in progress)“, I hit “Download only” again. Once again the page just reloads and there’s no test result anywhere. I try to check the “without Flash” box the same way I described here. I didn’t manage that even after several attempts, so I want to try a different speed tester. In the address bar I delete the whole long URI and type dsl.cz. But Opera Mini doesn’t load dsl.cz; instead it starts measuring the speed on rychlost.cz!! The whole page render is split into tiles that flash one after another, and when it’s still the same after several minutes, I type the address dsl.cz again.
This time it really does load dsl.cz, and quite fast too. I click “Speed measurement test” and I never get any further than the point where it says “Please wait, the measurement is starting“. So from my point of view, Opera Mini renders HTML at a decent level; the problem is JavaScript, which gives it a lot of trouble. On top of that, the back touch button doesn’t work the way everyone would expect, but moves you around the page, apparently to wherever you were before.
The phone doesn’t support multitasking, so when you close Opera Mini with the end call button, it starts again with a clean slate next time. Also, relaunching Opera Mini isn’t fast either. After inserting a new SIM card and turning the phone on, it asks whether you want to transfer contacts to the phone. That’s not necessary, though; contacts on SIM cards show up in the phone normally even without it. What you can’t deny the phone is its speed. Unless it’s some app written in Java, everything is practically instant.
I don’t know whether the phone will remember the SIM card in use, but when I typed a number and chose a SIM and then wanted to write a message, it always offered SIM 1 and I had to switch to SIM2 manually. The software environment reminds me most of OS Bada or Tizen. The phone is unlocked first with the button on the right and then by dragging the arrow area upward. The interface is very nice; you can tell someone put thought into it. Details like the 3 options at the bottom of most apps and the 3 touch buttons below them make for an appealing whole.
What bugs me a bit is that when the phone locks and I turn the display back on, it first shows me the screen of the previous app and only then the lock screen. You can place various widgets on the home screen, and you have a total of 5 pages reserved for them. The wallpaper doesn’t change when switching from one page to another, as it does in some Android ROMs. One widget tells you, for example, about data usage, SMS and calls. The last 2 of these probably count only outgoing ones, because today I received an SMS and a call on this phone with the same SIM cards, yet the counter shows 0:0 for calls and 0 for SMS. Another widget is for turning WiFi on/off.
Unfortunately, after turning it on, no further dialog appears where you could choose a WiFi network or enter its password. You can only do that after launching the WiFi app from the main menu. The camera is nothing to write home about, whether because of its maximum resolution of 2 MP or because of the optics, but that’s to be expected from such a cheap phone. It looks like you’ll be able to install some more apps on the phone, but I didn’t explore the “games and apps” menu item any further.
Of the built-in apps, almost all of those you’d find on an Android phone are there. The phone doesn’t include a single app from Microsoft, but it does include plenty from Google – Google Maps, YouTube, Google search, and so on. In total, the top-level menu folder has 32 icons/apps. The phone cost me 1,624 CZK. It could be bought cheaper, but I bought it at euronics.cz so that if my dad didn’t like it, he could return it for 1,499. Shipping then cost 125 CZK, even though euronics.cz provided Heureka with false information, which then claimed that shipping was free.
I’m really curious whether my dad will accept it, whether it’ll end up with my mom, or whether he’ll return/sell it. And the verdict? If you don’t use your phone for the internet or don’t need any smartphone app, you can go for this phone. It has a really small battery, but it’s power-efficient and also has a power-saving mode. Otherwise, pay a few hundred more and buy some Android or a Windows Phone. This phone isn’t for me; my favorite system is Windows Phone, but I have Android and I hope it stays that way for a good long while. You can find more information and photos of this phone on Heureka: https://mobilni-telefony.heureka.cz/lg-t30-dual/porovnat-ceny/#section