LG Xenon GR500 Review

Primarily aimed at the youth, the LG Xenon GR500 is a slider phone which is very light and is very adept at using for texting. Most of the other slide...


Primarily aimed at the youth, the LG Xenon GR500 is a slider phone which is very light and is very adept at using for texting. Most of the other slider phones ruin the effect for texting with the use of a Qwerty keyboard, which many find clumsy to use, but the phone in question uses a touch screen to make it easier. The styling looks a bit like the Razr with the customary “chin” at the bottom but is a more bulked up version. Apart from the ease of texting, the Xenon provides a plethora of music, video and internet surfing power. The phone is affordably priced at $99 and it has a two year contract with an additional main-in rebate. These reasons have helped us to choose it as the Editor’s Choice of a feature phone on AT& T.

LG Xenon GR500 Design

Unlike most of the other slider phones, the Xenon is smaller and has dimensions of 4.2 x 2.1 x 0.6 inches. It weighs a minimal 3.8 ounces which goes in tandem with the new fad of having ultra-light phones. There are many variations of the handset base on color. There are options of red, blue and black. The phone also provides an additional side Qwerty keyboard which is normally used for a horizontal layout. Some people might feel that the style is a bit cramped but the phone offers enough functionality after a few times.

The screen of the phone is what stands out. The touch screen offers a rich display of 240 x 400 pixel resolution and the size of the same is 2.8 inches. There is a color display of 65K which is what most phones use nowadays. It loses out to the Samsung Highlight which offers a much higher color display of 16 million colors on the same pixels on T-Mobile. The menu graphics and tabs are very basic and easy to handle. The primary buttons like the Send and the End are fairly responsive and a host of other smaller buttons on the side helps in making texting really easy. There is also the option of adding widgets on the screen but the touch screen is a bit too tough to use since it offers strong haptic feedback. This can be toned down by going to the Settings menu. The accelerometer is also good to use but then it does not function with all the modes. For instance, there is a real problem when browsing music files and using the memory card.

LG Xenon GR500 Features

The Xenon is available in Edge and 3G in quadruple and dual band form respectively. This might not allow you to get high-speed data but that is acceptable since this phone is an entry-level handset. The best aspect about the phone was that it did what is supposed to do. Crystal clear call clarity even in rural areas is a good way to hook the customers and even the 3G network is good in out of town places. It is better to use the headset rather than the speakerphone because of the clarity and it offers a decent 4 hours 21 minutes talk time. The phone supports Yahoo, AIM and Windows Live but only the Aim buddy icons were getting displayed. The email client can be used on to log into six or seven common ISPs and can be sued for Windows Live, Yahoo, AOL, AIM and some others but not Gmail. The Media Net Web browser offers a lot of functions like zoom and the like but the slightly sticky touch screen did not respond well to these commands. Though it takes a bit of time to load the desktop sites, it can look especially good with all page alignments. The feature which looks great are the WAP sites and the GPS radio readily hooks on to the navigation services offered by AT& T for a minimal $9.99 every month.

LG Xenon GR500

On the flipside, the phone markets the music player as one of the best features but fails to live up to it. It does not even offer any wired ear-buds which is a shame. The overall quality of the music is good and it supports formats like WMA and MP3. Though the video files play exceptionally well, there is only supported format out here which is MP4. None of the other commonly recognized video formats play well, like AVI and WMV.

There is a 2.0 megapixel camera bundled in the phone which is able to click decent soft pictures, both indoors and outdoors. The LED flash should not be used because it ruins the composition. The videos are 320 x 240 pixels and are of good quality outdoors which cannot be said indoors. The video tends to jerk and become grainy. There’s space for 100MB internal memory and the option to use up to 16GB cards.

LG Xenon GR500 Review Conclusion

Though the Xenon has a lot of these blips, it manages to provide what the people were looking for, in terms of price and features. The obvious competitor would be the iPhone 3G with an identical price tag. The absence of the Qwerty in the latter might harm its chances a bit and there is also the expensive data plan on the same. Another direct competitor might be the $79 priced Nokia Surge which is more expensive after all the features have been included. A final note, if anyone’s looking for camera features, then they would obviously head for the Sony Ericsson $179 priced C905a, which features all of the cyber shot options along with an amazing 8.1 megapixel camera.

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One Response to “LG Xenon GR500 Review”

  1. I’ve had my LG Xenon for your final year, but I only recently discovered this internet site, Up right up until now, I under no circumstances genuinely looked into employing the telephone as something but a voice and SMS device, but whilst it was out for repair I had been making use of a Motorola KRZR like a back-up and I genuinely hated it. I’m also a former employee of Rogers Wireless, where I was a member with the Network Operations group; they would be the ones accountable for your inter/intra-site transport, switching and base-station network. Whilst we never got to play with as well a lot consumer hardware, I do know for a simple fact there is certainly ‘un-branded’ firmware readily available for every single telephone in existence. Previous to a carrier decides to carry any cellphone they get a base design from your manufacturer that they demo and set via tests – discovering one of these demo units would likely be simpler said than performed on the other hand. Most of the time, they just get passed of to friends or loved ones members who don’t even understand that the phone is unlocked and unbranded.

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