LG 7100 Review
First Impressions
My first impressions on the LG 7100 was what a fantastic looking phone, not like your run of the mill clamshells but I thought it looked really solid and stylish and somehow different to the rest.The first most noticeable thing about it has to be its rotating camera, which I thought at the time was really unusual.
Sizes & Dimensions
- Length 90mm
- Width 48mm
- Depth 23mm
- Weight 93.5gm
Features
- 270-degree swivel screen
- High-resolution digital camera
- High quality external display
- 32 chord polyphonic ring tones
- Infrared connection
- MMS enabled
- Voice dialling
- Speed dialling
- Melody composer
Menu Structure
I didn't think that the menu on the LG was hard to use, you navigate the menus using the four-way scroll button on the handset.
- Messages: MMS, Text, voicemail and settings
- Camera: photo library, settings and take pictures
- Call register: call lists
- Profiles: a choice of six different profiles
- Settings: IRDA date & time and call and phone settings
- Orange: which takes you straight to the orange browser
- Organiser: alarm clock, diary
Camera
The LG comes with a 270-degree rotating camera, which looks really impressive but in reality is really hard to use. With the flip open and the camera rotated, which you have to do to take a pic, I found the phone to feel really unstable and very top heavy to the extent that I was concerned about dropping it. So the whole business of picture taking I felt was really awkward. The camera on the phone is really impressive, with four resolution settings, the highest being 640*480 and the lowest being 48*48.You also have the option to have the flash on or off, and the option to rotate an image 90 degrees clockwise, which I found to be really confusing, especially with the screen already swivelled.There are three image qualities, high, normal and low and three different effects, normal, sepia and black & white.
This handset also has a four times zoom and a brightness adjustor.The pictures that I took I thought came out really well and were very impressive. While I felt that taking the pictures was really awkward, sending them was easy; MMS worked perfectly each and every time. The phone has an Infrared connector, which worked ok, but it wasn?t too strong a signal and was fiddly to operate. Another option for transferring pictures is to use the serial port cable that came with the phone and the included software?more about this later. You store the photos in the photo library but I found on numerous occasions while accessing this feature that the phone would crash and the only way to recover would be too take the battery out of it, so I thought that this was annoying as well as worrying.
The Display
The internal display is a high resolution 128*160, 65k colour screen that displayed pictures really nicely, it was bright and clear. The screen is also used as the viewfinder for the camera. The 7100 also has an outer 256-colour display, which shows the callers name and number and caller group icon if one is assigned. The outer display is animated if you push the button on the side of the phone.The most striking thing about the outer display is the mirror finish, in standby mode the display seems to be a normal mirror but once you receive a call the display changes almost magically from a mirror to a window where you can view the callers details.
Design
The design was what first attracted me to this phone, it isn?t a small flimsy looking handset but rather a strong robust feeling handset. The design has been very well thought out with a button on the side which when pressed takes you straight to the camera menu.The battery cover however is truly awful, the only way I could get the battery cover off, which I needed to do often as it was the only was to bring the phone out of a crash was to put a pin into the rubber release catch, hold the phone upside down and tap it gently?..not good. The arial seems to be solid and unlike many aerials it?s quite thick and stubby.
Battery Life & Signal Strength
The battery is quoted at 200 hours but I found with average usage that the battery lasted about two and a half days. The signal strength was pretty good and I found it to be consistent.
Software
And here comes the bad points. The phone comes with a serial port cable to connect your phone to your pc and download the pictures you have taken. The software installed really easy, however once I connected the phone to the pc and tried to transfer a ring tone or wallpaper from the software to the phone the transfer would get so far and freeze, resulting in the phone crashing. Another major error was that the supplied software didn?t have any facility to transfer pictures from the camera to the pc, so I had to visit the LG website and download the updated software (22mb), once this was installed the option for transferring pictures was there but once again the phone crashed and I had to remove the battery yet again. On searching the Internet for answers to this problem it appeared that there were loads of people with the same problem.
Summary
When I bought this phone I was so excited, to me it seemed such a nice handset and one, which not many people owned. However with the phones software to pc issues and the fact that the phone kept crashing and switching itself off for no reason I quickly became disillusioned and disappointed. It seemed that the handset had many problems. The design, camera and call clarity I felt were superb but I could never recommend this handset to someone who wanted a reliable phone.
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