LG Rumor Touch (Virgin Mobile) review: LG Rumor Touch (Virgin Mobile)

Now that Sprint owns Virgin Mobile, it's no surprise that a few of Sprint's phones have made it to the prepaid carrier's lineup. The LG Rumor Touch is one such device, and though the hardware remains the same, the Rumor Touch is now available for $149.99 without a contract for Virgin Mobile customers who like going the prepaid route. The only difference between the Sprint and Virgin Mobile models lies in their respective services. The Virgin Mobile version doesn't have Sprint Music or Sprint TV, and offers Virgin Mobile Navigator instead of Sprint Navigator for maps and turn-by-turn direction.

7.3

LG Rumor Touch (Virgin Mobile)

$98 at eBay

The Good

The LG Rumor Touch has a very text-messaging-friendly interface. Its slider QWERTY keyboard is easy to use, and we like that it has a 3.5mm headset jack for music, e-mail, social networking support, and great call quality.

The Bad

The LG Rumor Touch's photo quality is average, and the touch screen isn't quite as responsive as we would like.

The Bottom Line

The LG Rumor Touch is a touch-screen phone for Virgin Mobile that is geared especially for messaging fans.

Because the phones are identical, we'll point you to our review of the LG Rumor Touch for Sprint for most of the design and features. As for applications and games, the LG Rumor Touch for Virgin Mobile comes with Midnight Bowling 2, Tetris, Pac-Man/Ms. Pac-Man, Google Maps, Email + IM, and Opera Mini. In this review, we'll focus on just call quality and performance.

Performance
We tested the LG Rumor Touch in San Francisco using Virgin Mobile. We were impressed by the call quality overall. There was very little static, and calls sounded crisp and clear. Callers said we sounded great as well. They did say voice quality was a little muddy at times, and we sounded rather muffled when in speakerphone mode. We thought the speaker quality was decent, but nothing earth-shattering. We wouldn't use the phone for listening to music; bass was weak, and songs lacked richness and depth.

The 3G speeds were quite good as well. We loaded the mobile CNET page in just 20 seconds, and the New York Times site in around 40 seconds.

The LG Rumor Touch has a rated battery life of 7 hours of talk time. According to our tests, the Rumor Touch has a talk time of 6 hours and 48 minutes. According to the FCC, it has a digital SAR of 1.2 watts per kilogram.