LG LX350 (Sprint) review: LG LX350 (Sprint)

There's not a lot you can say about the LG LX350 for Sprint. It's attractive without being stylish, it's functional without being remarkable, and its call quality is serviceable without being exceptional. In all, it's a quality middle-of-the-road cell phone that performs its basic functions relatively well, and it manages to pack in some bonus features, including a 1.3-megapixel camera with admirable photo quality, a speakerphone, and Bluetooth. Although the last offering is relatively half-baked, a fact that won't please hands-free fanatics, less-demanding users should find little to complain about. The LX350 is much too expensive if you pay the full price of $229, but service rebates can knock it down to a more reasonable $49.

Like the proverbial little black dress, the similarly hued LG LX350 goes with just about everything. The basic black and bright-silver touches make for a pleasant overall design that's attractive but unlikely to turn heads on the street. The compact (3.6 by 1.9 by 0.9 inches), lightweight (3.7 ounces) form factor makes for a phone that's easily portable but doesn't sacrifice a solid construction or a comfortable feel in the hand.

In the center of the front flap is the postage-stamp-size (96x64 pixels; 4 lines) external display. Supporting a bright 65,000 colors, it shows the date, the time, battery life, signal strength, and photo caller ID. You can change the wallpaper and the backlighting time, which is a good thing, since the screen disappears completely when dark. Above the display is a camera lens, as well as a flash that doubles as a status light that glows when you're on a call; you can also turn it off. There's no self-portrait mirror, but you don't need it, as the display functions as a viewfinder for those vanity shots. Completing the outside of the handset are a camera key on the right spine, along with a volume rocker, a headset jack, and a voice-dialing key.

The sleek LX350 has some nice design touches.

Inside the LG LX350, you'll find a 262,000-color main display. At 1.8 inches diagonally (128x160 pixels; 11 lines), it's a decent size, and though colors are sharp, smaller objects and gaming graphics are somewhat fuzzy. It's fine, however, for scrolling though the simple menus, which are available in two styles, and you can change the backlight time and the font size. Below the display is the spacious navigation array, consisting of a five-way toggle, two soft keys, and the traditional Talk and End/power buttons. All keys are tactile and easy to use by feel. The toggle doubles as a shortcut to four user-defined functions, while the soft keys open the Web browser and the phone book when the mobile is in standby mode. Below the array are dedicated keys for the speakerphone and the camera, as well as a Back button. Despite their thinness, all three controls make for an intuitive user experience. The midsize, round keypad buttons are spaced far apart and raised above the surface of the phone. The numerals on the keys are big, but the backlighting is dim.

We liked the LG LX350's photo quality.

The LG LX350 has a decent feature set that includes all of the essentials and a few extras. The address book stores 500 contacts, with room in each entry for five phone numbers, an e-mail address, a Web address, and notes. You can assign your friends to caller groups or pair them with a picture or one of 20 polyphonic (72-chord) ring tones. The handset also offers Sprint's new Wireless Backup service, as found on the Samsung SPH-A580. Basic offerings include a vibrate mode; an alarm clock; 3 minutes of voice-memo recording time; voice commands and dialing; text and multimedia messaging; a calculator, a world clock; support for e-mail and instant messaging; a notepad; and LG's handy tip calculator.

On the higher end, the LG LX350 comes with a full-duplex speakerphone, which can be activated before you make a call, and Bluetooth, though not the most user-friendly implementation of it. While you can use Bluetooth to connect to a headset, support dial-up networking, and send an electronic business card or a calendar appointment, it doesn't support file transfers--an unfortunate and restrictive move on Sprint's part. Alternatively, you can order prints from your Sprint online album, or you can send them to a computer or a printer with the carrier's PictBridge service. You'll need a USB cable for the latter, though, and it doesn't come with the phone.

The 1.3-megapixel camera takes pictures in only three resolutions--960x1,280, 480x640, and 240x320--but you get a fair number of editing options, including three quality settings; four shutter sounds, plus a silent option; adjustable brightness and white-balance settings; four color tones; a 5- or 10-second self-timer; a 15X digital zoom; and a flash. The camcorder records 3G2 clips in one resolution (176x144) with sound. Editing options are similar to the still camera's. For saving your work, the LG LX350 comes with a healthy 30MB of shared memory. At the most, it will hold 66 photos at the highest resolution. Photo quality was quite good, with vivid colors and sharp object outlines. The LX350 is one of the better megapixel camera phones we've seen.

You can personalize the LG LX350 with a variety of clock styles, screensavers, color skins, and alert sounds. More options and ring tones are available from Sprint via the WAP 2.0 wireless Web browser. What's more, you can save your own voice memos as ring tones. Gaming options are limited; demo versions of five Java (J2ME) games are included--2Fast 2Furious, Midnight Pool, Tetris, Ms. Pac-Man, and World Poker Tour--so you'll need to buy the full titles.

We tested the dual-band, dual-mode (CDMA 800/1900; AMPS 800) LG LX350 in San Francisco using Sprint's service. Call quality was good overall. There was plenty of volume, but audio quality sounded a bit tinny, almost as if we were talking to a robot. Callers reported the same on their end and could tell we were using a cell phone. It wasn't a huge deal, but it was noticeable nonetheless. Speakerphone calls had about the same quality, and volume was satisfactory. We paired the LX350 with the Plantronics Explorer 320 Bluetooth headset; call quality was fine but nothing special.

The LG LX350 has a rated talk time of 4 hours and a promised standby time of just more than 14 days. In our tests, we found the LG LX350 had a tested talk time of 3 hours, 45 minutes. According to FCC radiation tests, the LG LX350 has a digital SAR rating of 0.75 watt per kilogram and an analog SAR rating of 1.12 watts per kilogram.