Gadgetory

greetings all this is deke Adams with pocketnow.com and today we're taking a closer look at the software on the verizon LG revolution so sit back relax and enjoy the show starting from when you power up the device you can see the verizon slide to unlock configuration here we've got pretty typical home screen configuration with widgets that come default you can move around as expected there is a little bit of a difference creates this grid of items and when you want to add widgets they actually appear down here you can add shortcuts and wallpapers as well back completely out of there you may notice that there's a lot of screen space taken up here with the dot indicators and the reason for that if we go in here to the phone app make a phone call and go to the home screen then you can see how the phone call overlay appears up at the top here taking up that space and though the dots are no longer there it's interesting and it's convenient from the aspect of not having to flip the notifier down in order to be able to switch back to the current call but when it's not in place the fact that it takes up so much screen space is a little annoying the verizon navigator and the Bing Maps do work just fine but they seem to work in a very typical horizon overlay fashion compared to the Google Maps we found that it didn't work nearly as well interestingly enough though in the app list and this is the app tray app drawer that is used by the LG revolution if you go down here at the bottom you can see I actually had to install google maps on the device now you thankfully you can install it but it didn't come default the google navigation google places latitude and maps all had to be installed to the fact the verizon did not include them by default speaking of the app tray everything is broken up into little sections we have communication then news and search media and then tools applications are this one was actually zero was actually up here in the media until I just updated it and then these are all the apps that i have downloaded it's pretty simple to manage the categories and move these around but i wanted to make sure that you saw how when you download a new app where those actually go they don't by default to move into the categories which would be make it more interesting as it stands it's a little funny to navigate around especially if you're used to any other app drawer this device is running froyo it's not running Gingerbread which is a little bit of a disappointment considering it's a brand new device and because of that this skin here does have a tendency to lag as you saw before when we open up the phone call just a few minutes ago it took a few seconds for that to launch if you pulled bar down then it has a verizon LG based launcher here to turn on airplane mode the GPS Bluetooth Wi-Fi and toggle the vibration on off and then it's a standard notifications here as you can see the scrolling is just fine little has a tendency to snag up unsurprisingly using the default browser now I'm pressing the home button here you can't see that but it took a couple of taps for it to actually rack this is a typical thing about this device as we mentioned the hardware swiping and tapping sometimes doesn't react as it should or what as one day's expect on the device messaging is about the same as expected one of the problems I have with a verizon this verizon based phone is that the number of apps that are included on here that you can't get rid of there actually full apps let's golf rock band slacker rock a rock a blockbuster you can't get rid of these even though they're on the device and they aren't the full versions of these apps the let's golf is a demo rock band is a demo and if you're gonna put demos on the device frankly you should be able to delete them other items of note on this device are Polaris Office to view your office apps the tune wiki that comes on it by default for looking for music and listening to streaming music amazon kindle comes out you felt netflix comes on default now let's talk about netflix for just a moment did some tests with this compared to the galaxy s 4g and the netflix when streaming at the exact same time for the exact same account Zack same movie the netflix on this device would seem to stutter and act choppy although the audio always stayed very clean and smooth versus the nexus s 4g from sprint which video was very smooth the entire time no glitchy nasaan either audio or video and as we mentioned in the hardware review the screen didn't look nearly as good since we talked about speed test last time we didn't get a chance to really look at results because i wanted to make sure that we showed off some LTE speeds this was up in Seattle here when you see we've got 10 and the nine averaging about about 10 across the board we moved down here this bottom section here was back in my home service area about 1 and then in the basement here 158 my office 129 151 some sir pretty miserable speeds in this area out about in the daylight then we got a little better speeds and then being up in the Seattle area you can see that I was getting a lot better speeds once the LTE kicked in I want to show you one particular disturbing thing about the being integration that comes on this device as expected you would have to expect some some sort of EULA before you could actually use the software which is fine but if we go in here and it launches the app and it says you need to view this service agreement most of us would just skip over it but let's say you wanted to view it what comes up is this and if you save you on PC site what you get is this again and again and again so you can't actually view the service agreement that it's asked asking you to accept in order to be able to use Bing if you hit the search button again you have to agree to the location services and the service agreement but you can't actually see on the device in order to be able to use being on here I'm going ahead and accept it the purposes of demonstrating it so you can see that it comes up here one interesting item to note in the settings which is pretty default for Froyo if we go into the wireless and networks then into mobile networks and then system select you can see here you can choose to enable LTE CDA or cdma only if you choose to make a change to either one of these the device actually has to reboot in order for it to be able to switch so if you're not an LT area and you want to save on some battery you actually have to reboot your device causing more battery loss than just being able to toggle the LTE 4G service on and on are on and off frankly I found the verizon LG revolution software to be about the same as the hardware yet another disappointment stacked on another disappointment even though there were some things that worked well on the whole it just doesn't seem to be a device that I would still recommend to people especially at this price point that they're currently selling it for at the time of this review anyway if it was several hundred dollars for this large of a screen and the average battery life then maybe maybe you could consider it but at the price are wanting to ask for right now it just doesn't seem worth the will you know disappointing color and the screen the battery life only be ending up about six hours the forced being the x apps you can't remove etc etc etc that bout wraps up our software review of the verizon LG revolution if you have any questions that you would like to see addressed on the final review drop us know below thanks for watching