LG Revolution Review

The LG brings the new LG Revolution to the battle field; its released on Verizons LTE network. This is only the third LTE phone, there is even less phones on LTE and 4G battle field. Some more LTE devices are HTC Thunderbolt and the Samsung Droid Charge, they all close together in dimensions and features, it is natural to compare all of them.

Hardware

The phone comes with usual wall plug-in with USB port and separate micro-USB cord, user guide and warranty information. No headphones or micro-HDMI cables can be there. The phone is priced at $250 on contract; you will have to spend money on buying cables and good headphones for this device. The phone seems to not very attractive in design, just plain and colorless. The phone seems to emulate its packaging perfectly, interrupted by a chrome strip on the left and right sides and a long piece of glass on the back. That is not enough for the phone to keep from blending in with dark surfaces. There is a minimalistic theme with this device that we are going to appreciate, its back and curved corners are the most visually appealing features; the corners are curved with the right touch of softness, and the back looks like bulging bubble. The 4.3-inch screen and good massive frame, we were amazed by its heft. It is wider and taller than the Thunderbolt, and shorter and skinner than Droid Charge. It seems a bit heavy and bulky in our palms; the phone is not slippery, a soft touch plastic surrounding the back.

We are happy with the micro-HDMI port for video out on the right side of the device. This port is volume rocker in the Thunderbolt, while the headphone jack is on the top left and the power/unlock button on the right. , but we are frustrated with this button was flush with the rest of the phone, making it a little more troublesome to press. On the left side it got the micro-USB charging port amidst the chrome lining, nothing rests the bottom besides the mic and the notch that opens the battery cover. On the back side, in the middle is a strip of glass that not only houses logos, the 5MP camera, and LED flash looks like a handy mirror. It got a thin speaker grill that actually remind us of one found on top and bottom of HTC Desire HD. On removing the battery cover we can see only half grill is used for speaker. The battery is 1500mAh keeping SIM card and a 16GB microSD card company. The extra storage here combined with 16GB of internal storage, it can be expanded up to 32GB for the microSD card slot.

On the front of the phone we got the mammoth display with speaker grill on the top 1.3MP front facing camera, video chat is becoming standardized now a days. There is no physical buttons on the front; the usual four Android navigation keys below the screen are touch-capacitive. The design feature to note is the inclusion of a lip at the very bottom, angles down until it meets the back to make it look like a slight chin. The front of the device reminds us of Optimus Black; one seamless piece of glass covers the entire display includes navigation buttons with a millimetre open at the top to leave space for speaker. The 4.3-inch 800*480 display resolution touchscreen display fits right in with the rest of the LTE crew. LG opted to throw in a standard TFT WVGA screen that still looks like very sharp compared to lower resolutions, the display turned out be brighter than the Super AMOLED Plus, whatever the brightness of the device is good.

Camera

The Revolution camera is the weakest of Verizons LTE phone trilogy, sports a fiver instead of eight. The sensors and optics play a lot in image quality, the images taken with this camera are highly detailed, we did notice a contrast deficit at times, colors are slightly washed out in images taken in direct sunlight. Low light pictures are mostly impressive, background goes dark if take pictures at sunset. The manual settings like focus, ISO, flash, zoom, and white balance etc., are available plenty. The dedicated mode for macro focus and automatic focus setting is good. We are disappointed with missing of dedicated shutter button, but LG created a trick: holding down the shutter key will keep the auto focus locked until you are ready to actually take the picture, like the two stage buttons on the regular camera. The camcorder on the Revolution had some bugs worked out. Playing a .3gp files on computer did not change the aspect ratio we had experienced on the Black. The 720p HD video cranked out a smooth and beautiful result.

Software

The Revolution comes with the Android 2.2.2 installed, it is the latest 4G phone on the Verizon network, but got an out-dated OS. The Android experience remembers it just like a LG Optimus Black, uses a comparable TI processor and the same RAM, makes most elementary tasks and animations seems as the CPU was running out of breath constantly. The UI was smooth and a little sluggish behavior in processor-heavy tasks this time around. It offers two virtual keyboards by default and given the choices between Swype and an in-house option. The latter keyboard was very responsive got auto correct features. The symbols are not enough on the main board. The Widgets menu adds more difference; long-pressing the home screen will brings you the menu style that looks like an app tray. On the bottom of the menu are tabs for the widgets, shortcuts, folders, and wallpapers categories to allow for easy switching back and forth as you decide how to customize and organize your phone.

The navigation is also tweaked at top to offer on/off toggles for vibration mode, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, mobile data, and airplane mode, a handy music player widget appears when a song is played or paused. LG did a great job in media player into the UI together. You can get rid of categories in the app tray. It also offers the ability to uninstall unwanted programs from the app tray. The bloatware was usual Verizon VCAST & Co. apps, plus random programs: Lets Golf2, Blockbuster, Rock band, Tune Wiki Rhapsody, Slacker, and Netflix. We tested Netflix by playing scenes from multiple movies while connected to 3G, 4G, and different Wi-Fi connections, the playback was choppy in each tests. It is the first Verizon LTE device to get the Microsoft Bing app and search widget were on the home screen, and all the web searches in the browser are done through this search engine. It can be removed from the home screen, but there is no Googles one as alternative. A way for that is you can get the third party browser that supports El Goog from the Android market.

Performance

All the three LTE devices with similar specs, did they have the same performance metrics?; other factors come into play here; type of processor used, RAM, the things are different here, so the performance was different in this case

Benchmark	LG Revolution	HTC Thunderbolt	Samsung Droid Charge
Quadrant	1913	1886	943
Linpack	39.6	40.1	13.6
Nenamark	39.2	32.7	42.2
Nenamark2	13.3	12.7	21.4
Neocore	65.1	59.5	56.9
Sunspider	4591	6213	7905

Then the next one here is LTE device does the battery hold up, we figured the Revolution 1500mAh battery would provide talk times somewhere in between Thunderbolt and Droid Charge. Unfortunately its much closer to the former. We got five and half an hours on one charge, it includes voice calls, and kept phone idle until the battery dead. Again we left the phone on to receive mails, the charge was their entire day. The speed we can reach in the 4G device is 13Mbps down and 8Mbps up, due to the increase in 4G subscribers. The calls in the Revolution came clean and clear. We havent experienced any dropped calls.

For: Call quality, Bright display, Solid build, Verizon LTE 4G

Against: Specs of the device – processor and RAM could be better, Battery life, Bulky, Camera is average

Conclusion

It is a good smartphone overall, it doesnt give anything new to the Verizons 4G line up. The battery life should be better, could not revolutionize the reputation the network with 4G. With optimistic name, it has no high end specs. The camera is not better; the upcoming smartphones are good under direct sunlight. The performance of the phone was pretty decent, and good one we noted is the call quality. It is also not having the good looks like the other LTEs, but it is the good phone who wants to enjoy the 4G LTE speeds.