Why You Can Trust CNET LG Lyric MT375 - red (MetroPCS) review: LG Lyric MT375 - red (MetroPCS)
LG Lyric MT375 - red (MetroPCS)
LG Lyric MT375 - red (MetroPCS)
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
As the major carriers fall over themselves to promote the flashiest phones and services MetroPCS is more than content to stick to stick to functional devices and affordable prepaid service. Admittedly, the carrier has begun to diversify in recent months--it now has touch-screen handsets and it will introduce 4G service later this year--but the LG Lyric is a perfect example of a MetroPCS handset. You'll find a user-friendly design, decent call quality, and a few features beyond the basics. It is well worth its $139 price tag--remember that MetroPCS doesn't make you sign a contract--and you should be able to get a $25 rebate if you buy it online.
Design
The Lyric TM375 is a near identical variant of Sprint's LG LX370. It has the same dimensions (4.06 inches long by 1.89 inches wide by 0.63 inch thick; 3.7 ounces) and slider design, but with an attractive red color. It's not the slickest phone around by any means, but we like its clean lines and trim profile. It also has a sturdy build and it feels comfortable in the hand.
The Lyric's bright 2-inch display supports 262,000 colors and a 240x320-pixel QVGA resolution. The menus are easy to use in both the list and icon styles and we like the shortcuts options on the home screen. Display customization options aren't extensive, but they should be enough for most users. You can change the backlight time, the background color, the wallpaper, the clock style, and the dialing font size, type and style.
Other exterior features are the same as on the LX370. The spacious navigation array consists of two soft keys, a circular navigation toggle with a central OK button, a Back control, and the Talk and End/Power key. The keypad is equally roomy and user-friendly. Though the keys are flat, we could dial by feel thanks to the slight ridges between rows. We also give the Lyric props for the large numbers on the buttons (an LG trademark). The volume rocker and Micro-USB charger jack are on the left spine, and the camera key, a voice command key, the microSD card slot, and the 2.5mm headset jack are on the right. On the Lyric's back side you'll find the camera lens and external speaker.
Features
The Lyric has a bigger phone book than the LX370 with space for 1,000 contacts, though in each entry you can store only four phone numbers (as opposed to six), two e-mail addresses, a memo, and two street addresses. You can then save contacts to groups, and pair them with a photo and one of 35 polyphonic ringtones.
Features for the Lyric are straight down the middle. Essentials include threaded text and multimedia messaging, a tip calculator, a speakerphone, an alarm clock, a calendar, a world clock, a calculator, a notepad, and a unit converter. On the higher end, you'll find a wireless Web browser, instant messaging (AIM and Windows Live), stereo Bluetooth, PC syncing and USB mass storage, voice dialing, and a voice memo recorder. And if that isn't enough, the Lyric also supports the carrier's ChatLink push-to-talk service and MetroNavigator for GPS location and turn-by-turn directions.
The Lyric's 2.0-megapixel camera can take pictures in six resolutions and three quality settings. Other settings include night mode, a 10x digital zoom, a brightness adjustment, four white balance settings, a self-timer, a multishot mode, and four shutter tones plus a silent option. The camcorder can shoot clips in two resolutions and offers a similar set of editing options. Clips for multimedia messages are capped at 15 seconds, but you can shoot for as long as an hour if you like.
Photo quality was about the same as on LX 370, though perhaps slightly better. As before, images are a tad dark, but colors were relatively natural and there wasn't too much image noise. Videos were mediocre, however. The Lyric has 42MB of user-accessible memory, and the microSD slot can accommodate cards up to 16GB.
The basic music player supports MP3 and AAC files. Features are slim, though you do get album art, playlist support, and shuffle and repeat modes. You also can send the music player to the background while using other functions and the airplane mode turns off the Lyric's transmitter for listening to tunes while flying. Fortunately, loading music on the phone is easy using a USB cable or memory card.
Performance
We tested the dual-band (CDMA 800/1900) Lyric in San Francisco using MetroPCS service. Call quality was quite satisfactory. Conversations were clear with no static or interference, and we didn't detect any distortion in the voice quality. The volume was sufficiently loud, and even though we had some difficulty in very noisy places, we were pleased with the experience.
Callers also reported few problems. They could tell that we were using a cell phone and a few friends mentioned the background noise issue, but that was the only complaint we heard. Speakerphone calls were fine. There was an echo sound at the highest volumes so we tended to keep the audio at the middle levels to avoid the distortion. In those instances, however, we had to be close to the phone if we wanted to hear. Bluetooth calls were satisfactory and we didn't have trouble with automated systems.
The Lyric has a rated battery life of 3.3 hours talk time and 16 days standby time. In our tests, the Lyric had a talk time of 2 hours and 55 minutes. According to FCC radiation tests, the Lyric has a digital SAR of 1.23 watts per kilogram.