Gadgetory

greetings all this is deke Adams with pocketnow.com and today we're going to take a closer look at the software on the LG spectrum for verizon so sit back relax enjoy the show as we mentioned in the unboxing the LG spectrum from verizon is running Android 235 we got the lock screen here and I kind of like this this glass effect here that this slide to unlock effect especially with my galaxy s2 that's kind of got the picture unlock this looks a little more impressive to the eyes but as soon as you go to the unlock piece you notice that you've got a skinned version of Android 235 which is gingerbread and it's LG's skin and it looks a lot like TouchWiz except it feels like TouchWiz without a whole lot of the optimizations that come with the touch which devices if we start here with the main screen you can scroll back and forth and see a little red dead at the top that tells us what page we are but as you can see I'm swiping through here pretty quickly and it has a tendency to lag up as especially goes by widgets and in the full review will try out using a different launcher and see if that makes much of a difference but what I found is that overall the device is just pretty laggy as software wise especially scrolling back and forth but you can add and remove items from this device for the pages as you would expect and when you move icons around it shows a little shadow version of the icon in the background to show you where you're going to drop that particular icon if you look at the task bar tray up here at the top I've got the standard buttons again it still takes a lot of space for what it really could for this type of screen I mean you've got some pretty big eigen especially right here the connected to and it shows the wireless network and then it shows a big banner here for Verizon Wireless it does absolutely nothing and then this portion of the screen is dedicated to the notifications so to me that's a little bit of ways to space and colors why that doesn't look all that hot not terribly impressed with it I'm not terribly disappointed if you don't have the wireless turned on or connected to something and you run into a wireless network and it brings up this annoying box oh and over and over again every time you pop into a never k just noticed this then you can tell it to turn off the you know ignore it for now but it'll nevitt ibly come back there's a option to change it but ran out of the box it's a little annoying as I mentioned before so then if we go into the app tray right here this is the default view that you get except I've expanded some of these options you see you can collapse these these categories here and it's again I'm tapping here and it's a little bit slow to open up these items and additionally there is a do the way that they use the scrolling effect you start scrolling then you tap and you tap on an icon it has a tendency to to pause the the screen a little bit so you have to kind of stop when you scroll you have to stop the scrolling and then tap on the icon in order for it to immediately launch it's not really a bug it's more of a feature but it is a an annoyance if you don't recognize that that's what's happening at first you can change the layout to list or category there is no standard view that you would get on India the other Android devices these days of course launching right into things there and then you can grab on the bar here and scroll up and down quickly through your applications it's going to go back to the category list here and then you can manage your apps and change the category here as well there is some bloat on here I should say there's a lot of bloat on here while I like the Amazon Kindle app as a software application it doesn't necessarily install especially the one like blockbuster it have no interest in using blockbuster on Android device especially when it comes with netflix on it scorecentre some people may like this but it's not really a bonus for me and then you've got some demos like need for speed hot pursuit and let's golf which require you to download additional pieces there's the mobile hotspot which is I've used to tether to this device and it works just like you would expect it to as well verizon navigated we'll come back to in just one moment and then we scroll down here we've got some of the default apps at least the navigation ones was installed by default that was a thankful touch and then it shows down here at the bottom what applications that I've installed to do some testing and and to use the devices i use in my daily functionality so going back up here to the verizon navigator this is going to lock the device up really quick so you have to watch the little carefully as I tap verizon navigator I've never been able to get this to actually launch successfully so here we go launch and black down here at the bottom you can see that the icons have lit up and if I power off the device power back on I get the lock screen but as soon as i slide the lock screen up and out see the verizon navigator application open the background lights lit up again but nothing happened the only way out of this is to toggle it on and off and before you swipe here is tech press and hold the power button that tell it to shut off it's the only way that I found it kicked back out of the verizon navigator application hopefully there really is a fix for that soon but that's a big big bad crash I've also had other crashes with this device today on the phone about midway through the phone call it popped up a notification that the phone had wanted to force close I had the option to wait and I told her to wait once and then it popped up that notification again and it promptly then disconnected me from the person on the other end of the line without giving me any notification that happened and then I couldn't use the phone again until I rebooted the device so it's this device and the software has been plagued with these sort of issues since I've received it not it just have not been impressed with LG's implementation of Android to 35 on the LG spectrum let's go ahead and go into settings here a couple of interesting options there's a lot of defaults here but if we go in here to mobile network so we can see that there's global data roaming access that's kind of a neat option here for this particular device with the LTE roaming capabilities and then also another interesting item that we have here is the gestures which can allow you to do different things like previous and next item by just tapping on the edge of the screen rather than swiping back and forth to flip the device over just to go into snooze on your alarm or even to pause the video by flipping the device over so those are some kind of neat functionality but unless you remember to turn them on you probably never know that they're there without some deep dive investigation because it certainly doesn't give you any tutorials like the Samsung devices do with their gestures so let's go ahead and launch the browser and go to pocket now calm and it's going to launch right in the mobile version first we'll switch that in just a moment and we'll scroll down desktop version there we go finally loaded now I'm scrolling up and down and things are a little better scrolling back and forth i zoom way in you can see the the screen looks very nice with this you know high resolution display but if I'm screw pinching out it's just kind of slowly chunking out there's another example of this slowness effect here if I go back into the settings and display and brightness I turn off the automatic brightness and then I scroll up to the top takes a few seconds for it to catch up I scroll all the way down same effect takes a few seconds for it to actually go all the way up or all the way down in brightness compared to other devices that's kind of slow now that may be something they're doing on purpose or maybe the construction of this particular display but it is something that's noticeable on this device switching over to the camera application see it's just got a very basic interface the toggle here for switching back and forth between the video camera and the standard camera I can switch the camera direction around I can zoom in I could toggle the flash and there are some other settings like peer color effect and white balance is 0 the focus mode whether auto or phase tracking and then you just press the and hold the button to take the shot as you would expect we'll cover more of the actual pictures in the Florida photo functionality and the detail of that in the hardware / view or tour that wraps up our software to wear for the LG spectrum from verizon if you have any comments or questions or would like to see us cover something specific in the hardware review please leave a comment below give us a thumbs up if you do like the video and thanks for watching you