Gadgetory

hey guys it's brandon minuman from pocket now calm and this is the software review of the LG fathom on verizon wireless let's get to it ok so again this is a windows mobile 6.5 point 3 device there haven't been that many devices released with that point 3 edition of the operating system it means that you have better support for finger friendliness it also has capacitive touchscreen support but of course the LG fathom does not have a capacitive touch screen it is resistive so it has a stylus which isn't the worst thing in the world it means that the screen is not as sensitive as you would get on some of the newer phones out there so I'm going to turn this on and point out some cool features on the unlock screen so what we have here and you saw it's going to come back is a gesture pad and what you can do with this is draw a letter that corresponds to a program so I've linked the letter T to my Twitter client so I type T kind of sloppily and it will load TWiki knee very very cool and you can assign a whole lot of letters to different programs so I've also done e4e ml so let me turn it back on here so if I do an e just with my finger it's going to all gmail awesome awesome feature a very smart way to add an enhancement to the lock screen so you you don't even have to unlock your lock screen to get to the application you just draw the letter with your finger I like that a lot and there's also another enhancement down here on the bottom you get to see your calendar but if you swipe you get play controls for your multimedia so you don't even have to unlock your device if you want to go to the next track or stop or pause nice little enhancement made by LG something that doesn't come standard on windows mobile 6.5 so we're just going to unlock here and be dumped into the the very vanilla windows mobile default today screen and it's it's a nice today screen it lets you slide along and do various things we can flick through our pictures we can go to music to our multimedia player phone see if we have any missed calls it'll integrate with favorite contacts dialing voicemail don't want to do that show you the time clock emails you can scroll through them calendar what's going on Internet Explorer and you get the point from their very basic very plain but if you like it clean and light then you will appreciate this home screen of course we can go into landscape screen rotation speeds are a little bit on the slow side compared to some newer devices that are out there but you can do that now something else that is new to windows mobile 6.5 point 3 and that's a mouthful to size that you can tap and hold on the notification bar up here and you can scroll through the notifications before they were really tiny and tough to press but in an effort to make things more finger friendly Microsoft has magnified them and speaking of magnet magnification if you press on this magnifying glass you get this interesting screen zoom which I really don't understand I don't know why you would ever use this but it's nice and it actually scales things quite nicely it's not like zooming in with a digital zoom where everything gets pix elated it's actually scaled quite nicely so if you have vision problems perhaps or you're trying to see something on the screen that is very small this will help you with that so let's go through some of the included programs here we can access the start menu obviously with the button on the bottom now or through this button here the hardware button it's always nice to have so here we have messages which is a kind of spur stop text messaging application that is a little bit nicer than what you get in the standard windows mobile we have visual voicemail on here we have mobile IM so you can use aim windows live messenger and yahoo going down the list we have city ID which is cool little program that lets you look up a phone number and find out the city and zip code so if i start typing it knows its pennsylvania by the area code i do the first three digits and it knows its media PA so that's a nice little handy application to have going down a list further we'll go into settings in a minute internet explorer comes on here but opera mobile doesn't come on here oddly i downloaded it immediately because i think it's a better browser for windows mobile of course skyfire is another good choice we have the bing search application which lets you check traffic and gas prices it's a free download for any windows mobile device and it's a really fantastic application it's kind of like Google Maps mobile which is also a free application for windows phone it's multitasking quite a bit right now as you can see with the one gigahertz Snapdragon processor it's pretty fast it only has 256 megabytes of RAM and as you're going to see it's only about 2 111 megabytes that is usable but still it's snappy it's definitely a quick device scrolling down we have Office Mobile here we have standard stuff voice calculator a voice command program you can you could say a command you can assign that to a hardware button so say you press this button over here and says please say a command so you can have that within easy reach and again I'm using my finger here not the stylist the screen is sensitive enough and definitely everything all of the UI elements are big enough so that I don't need to take out the stylus we have adobe reader le we have the very basic games here just solitaire we have some widgets very standard stuff that you get on Windows Mobile let's talk about web browsing using opera mobile so you can get a sense for the performance so let's launch it up here and I'm going to slide out the keyboard and we'll go to pocketnow.com and let's I what you go it's on opera turbo right now so it should be a little bit faster it's using some server side rendering that appeared very fast although it's not quite finished with all the graphics yet well really stopped loading most of the graphics we can tap tap once to zoom in maybe if it works today there goes and we can tap on a headline let's see how fast that loads okay and again it's not loading all the images I think that's because it is on opera turbo let's go to engadget com and here's the mobile version we're going to go to the the full version here you can actually use the d-pad to select if you're having trouble with the touchscreen this may be a good time to use the stylus actually to be more precise on the screen okay so here we are we can use the d-pad to scroll and move around on the screen or we can use our finger see what happens when we go fast get a little bit of checkerboards there it's not keeping up as capably as some of the newer devices out there I think that maybe because it's running out of RAM a little bit and this is you know loading a lot of images but overall if you if you're not a huge rush the rendering fidelity is quite good opera mobile is a great browser and you can also try skyfire there are many choices if you are using windows mobile and you want a good browser so let's get out of that okay let's jump into settings now so we're going to go up to lock here and we're going to talk about that the gesture panel on how you add different things to it here we have the on-screen keyboard I want to talk about that in a second if you don't feel like using the hardware keyboard here you can use the on-screen keyboard let's go over to gesture and here's the list of gestures I've got set up and what you can quite simply do is you can remove one of these you can only have two four six seven at a time so if i delete calendar i have the opportunity to add another quite simply you select from the drop-down list of programs if you want to open excel mobile you can assign a letter to it let's say e click done and then if you go back to the gesture pad and do this you will be able to if you prep if you do an e you'll be able to launch its own mobile okay so let's check out the other settings here we can go to items on the today's screening you'll see there are no items we can add beyond the really standard stuff there is no custom interface here the LG has added you get the simple windows default today screen of course we can change some colors here we can change the theme to rock and republic black here which should give you a different home screen look the bottom bar changes in color a little bit so nice a little way to spruce things up and go into system let's take a look at how much memory we have as I said there's 211 megabytes of RAM in use I've got a lot I've only had I only have forty two megabytes of free ram here so if I open up a few more programs going to start slowing down a little bit storage card there is no storage card installed of course we can change the backlight settings we can have it be on automatic screen brightness typical windows mobile stuff there really isn't that many things in here that are special here are the settings for the sensors accelerometer is on all the time so in any screen it will go into landscape swipe over to the right the luminosity sensor which the light sensor is turned on in the proximity sensor which determines if your head is near the phone while you're on a call is also turned on so very basic settings here nothing really interesting to speak of we go into connections likewise standard wireless manager skin that you get in Windows Mobile okay let me show you the on-screen keyboard before concluding the software review here and a lot of programs open here some of them don't close so go into office mobile word make a new document and say this is not the best experience this is a test of the keyboard because the screen isn't isn't that sensitive it's very tough to type on this on-screen keyboard which makes me grateful that it has this keyboard over here so that a little bit easier with the hardware keys so overall it looks like LG really didn't put much effort into customizing the LG fathom it's a very vanilla installation of windows mobile 6.5 point 3 practically out of the box without any really enhancements or customizations that may be a good thing for you if you like things like and clean but it may not be a good thing for you if you like to have a kind of better experience with some eye candy and some nice usability enhancements I really enjoy the lockscreen function with the gesture pad I think that's extremely helpful in being able to quickly launch programs without having to unlock your device so points for that but I still say if you're on Verizon and you want a device with a slide-out keyboard that's running windows and mobile the touch pro 2 is definitely the way to go in fact it's half the price of the LG fathom there's really no reason not to go with that we'll have the full review coming up soon on pocketnow.com with battery tests and performance remarks and things like that be sure to follow us on Twitter for more on smartphones twitter.com slash pocket now sweets please 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