Android – Iphone – Applications

And we finish out the week with a shot of LG, a simple-looking flip phone that won’t bring a whole lot of features with it, but will put those features together in a fairly simple to use package that handles nicely. Today we’re talking about the LG AX310.

The LG AX310 is, as I said, a flip style phone that offers speakerphone, voice commands that don’t need the speaker, Bluetooth connectivity, a 1.3 megapixel camera with a 10x zoom and a panoply of options in and of itself, an external smaller screen that displays date, time, battery life and reception, a variety of downloadable ringtones and games via Alltel Shop, text messaging, picture messaging, a phone book with sufficient space for a thousand entries, GPS, USB port, calendar, alarm clock, calculator, hearing aid compatibility, and a battery capable of yielding five hours of talk time on a single charge.

The good news is that this phone has a really smooth navigation system. It’s a pretty basic icon-based navigation system that’ll move along with the keypad. Nothing here you likely haven’t already seen or dealt with several times before.

The bad news is that the phone is so profoundly basic that it’s not providing anything of much use. A minimal camera, a web experience largely limited to downloads…it’s so basic that there’s next to no reason to even recommend it. Sure, what’s here is very well put together, but there’s so much that isn’t here you can find significantly better phones in literally any of a hundred other directions.

If you’re needing simple, the LG AX310 is, however, the direction you’ll want to go in. That’s no problem at all. But if you need a phone to deliver some utility, you’ll want to look just about anywhere else.

The Good

Simple interface

Decent battery life

The Bad

Minimal features available

Score 4 / 10

written by \\ tags: alltel, Bluetooth, cell phones, Games, lg cell phone, mobile, nokia, nokia-mural, phone, speaker

I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting much out of the Nokia E71X until I got deeper into it.  And then it put out a whole lot of exciting features that really made me think twice. There’s a lot to like here, and I’m going to run down the full list.  Advance warning: there’s not going to be much here that actually isn’t good, so if you’re looking for me to tear a phone apart, this is not your day.

The Nokia E71X is a candy bar style smartphone that offers up 3G connectivity and Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a full QWERTY keyboard, conference call capability, speakerphone, compatibility with most of the major messenger systems (Yahoo, AOL, and Windows Live / MSN messenger), mobile web, mobile email, Java application capability, GPS, AT&T Music and video calling, support for most of the Microsoft Office suite, a 3.2 megapixel camera with automatic focus, alarm clock, calendar, calculator, and a battery that yields four and a half hours of talk time on a single charge.

At this point about the only bad thing you can say about this incredibly robust cell phone is that the QWERTY keyboard layout is a bit cramped and the battery is a little short in life.  These are pretty minor quibbles when balanced against the sheer amount of capability this thing brings to the table.  It’ll offer just about anything you might need in a professional situation, and that’s definitely not something to sneeze at.

The Nokia E71X is definitely a smartphone to look at if you’re looking for a phone that can do it all but doesn’t say “Blackberry” on it.

The Good

Incredible variety of features

The Bad

Shortish battery life

Cramped keyboard

Score 8 / 10

written by \\ tags: aol, Application, black, cell phone, cell phones, msn, music, nokia, nokia-e71x, nokia-mural, permanent-link, phone, windows