Gadgetory

this is David with the virgin this is the LG spectrum it's a new one hundred ninety nine dollar verizon phone but we've seen two phones like it before there's the optimus LTE in europe and the nitro HD also on AT&T and this is just a variant of both of those phones it has the same 720p IPS display which is really great it's got super accurate colors and it's really bright and just looks really good it's one of the best features of the phone there's a 1.5 gigahertz processor inside along with a gig of ram and 4 gigabytes of internal storage the phone in general works really well it's really snappy everything happens pretty much instantly there's the occasional delay when you hit the home button or you're swiping between home screens but that's pretty normal for any Android phone and it's certainly not worse here than anywhere else one of the things that LG is promoting about the spectrum is its integration with ESPN scorecenter app the apps available for all android phones but it comes pre-loaded on the spectrum and for the first time it'll actually stream 720p video so you can get highlights and game footage and all kinds of stuff all in 720p it actually looks really good i don't know if you buy a phone based on it but it's a really nice feature to have for sports fans other than the screen the its connectivity to verizon's LTE network is probably the phone's best feature it's super fast and works really well it's not quite as good as what we got on the Nitro where we got up to 60 megabits of download speed but it works really quickly and really fast we got about 17 to 18 megabits download speed on verizon's LTE and it's a much more widespread network so that's the good stuff but unfortunately there's a fair amount of things we didn't love about the spectrum the primary thing is the software it has the same UI skin as the as the Nitro and LG just kind of unnecessarily customized basically everything about the phone the app drawer is by default broken up into these kind of nebulous categories and it makes it really hard to find anything you want or if you put it you can make it a list and it worse things difficult it's just hard to scroll through and find what you're looking for especially since there's a lot of bloatware you'll do a lot of scrolling to try find any app that you're looking for on the phone there's also it's got this blue on blue color scheme that just doesn't look very good and it doesn't really hurt the performance of the phone but it just kind of makes it ugly the browser performance fortunately is actually really good LG didn't do much to customize the look of it but it actually works really well holding it next to a Galaxy Nexus say it actually Scrolls a little smoother and even the small text is easy to read because of the really good display the other big problem is just the build quality of the phone it looks a lot like the nitro HD or the optimus LTE but it's built a little differently instead of the super textured back that some of the other phones have it's got this really glossy back which is one really prone to fingerprints and to just looks and feels really bad in the hand it feels kind of slimy and slippery and it's just hard to hold on to I was constantly like wiping my hands on my pants because I feel like I was sweating but it's the phone is just not nice to hold and it's also got all of its ports and Jack's crammed up at the top it's got the same super breakable piece of plastic up at the top that you should just snap off as soon as you buy the phone it's also got three capacitive android buttons instead of four they combined the search and menu buttons into one so if you long press you get search and if you press it short you get menu and it's also got for some reason this funny silver border around the home button which makes it look like a physical button even though it isn't and it's just kind of an odd look and almost makes the phone look like it's a knockoff of an actual android phone in general it works you know like you'd expect any Android phone to its call quality is pretty solid it's actually better than the night show or the optimus LTE but the the one problem is with the speakerphone and the speaker is not that loud anyway and it's also on the back the speaker's placed kind of right where you want to put your hand so and you just can't hear when you're holding the phone on speaker phone but if you move it away the speaker phone works fine if a little quiet there are two cameras on the spectrum there's an eight megapixel camera on the back and a 1.3 megapixel one on the front and the front is exactly what you'd expect it's fine for video chat but not much else the back is to it has a nice tap to focus feature like some of the samsung and motorola phones we've seen and it's also really fast it focuses and takes shots much quicker than a lot of smart phones out there it also shoots 1080p and 720p video which is again pretty fast overall the spectrum is a lot like the nitro HD which we gave a good score in spite of its bad software because it was a really well-built phone but unfortunately on verizon LTE and a 720p display don't really set you apart and the poor build quality and the bad software again just don't make the spectrum a particularly appealing device especially when there's the droid razr or the HTC Rezound or the Galaxy Nexus all available there's just no real reason to buy the spectrum even at a hundred ninety-nine dollars