Cingular gets LG F9200

Cingular is now offering the LG F9200. Modeled on the earlier instant-messaging phone, it hides a full QWERTY keyboard, but it improves upon its predecessor in a number of ways. Most significantly, it supports access to AOL, Yahoo, and Hotmail e-mail accounts, a feature that was sorely missing from the F9100. Besides e-mail, you get text and multimedia messaging, instant messaging, a speakerphone, voice dialing, and a refined numeric-keypad design. Bluetooth is sadly missing, but text-messaging addicts may not miss it anyway. I'm not thrilled, however, with the addition of the VGA camera. For one thing, as megapixel camera phones continue to explode in numbers, I'm a bit skeptical when a manufacturer includes a simple VGA model instead. Also, one of the great things about the F9100 was that it was one of the few cell phones with a keyboard but not a camera. As more businesses restrict camera phones on their premises, we need more feature-rich mobiles that ditch the camera altogether but not the keyboard.