| Review of the LG TG800F |
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The LG TG800F is the GSM version of the Chocolate. While Fido doesn’t seem to use the name Chocolate on their web page, the box and user guide for the phone do refer to it as such. The big selling point of the chocolate line is its use of touch-sensitive keys for many of the buttons on the phone (though the numeric keypad is still a standard mechanical type).
The LG TG800F is available on Fido. Last Updated: 15-Jan-2007 |
Before reading this review, please read
Some Thoughts on Phone Reviewing.
Special thanks to StudentPhones
for lending the TG800F for this review.
RF Performance
RF Sensitivity: A number of tests were performed in
both Square One and Ikea to see how well the TG800F compared with an old
Nokia 6340i. The Nokia has really good RF
sensitivity, but can be matched by quite a few phones on the market. Sadly the
Chocolate performed poorly compared to the 6340i, loosing the audio while the
Nokia was still able to provide interference-free performance. Because the
TG800F has a built-in (hidden) antenna, tests were performed holding the phone
in a variety of different ways to ensure that my fingers were not interfering
with the antenna.
Based on my experiences with other phones (tested in these locations), the
TG800F ranks as about average (to slightly below average) when it comes to
pulling in weak signals.
Over-the-road Performance: The phone’s ability to
cope with handoffs and network problems seems to be a slightly above average,
but it doesn’t come close to matching the performance of the recently-tested
Motorola PEBL or some of the more recent Nokia
models. In a way, the phone sounds pretty much like a slightly-improved Nokia of
yore. Handoffs are sometimes tame, and sometimes quite obvious, but I have to
admit I never found them particularly annoying during the tests.
Despite the phone’s inability to perform with the best of them, I’m still going
to give it a “good” rating for this aspect, because I’ve heard plenty of GSM
phones that handled over-the-road issues far worse than this.
Click on this link for a full description of
RF Performance, and how to interpret it.
Audio Performance
Tonal Balance: Not bad, but a little bit harsh and
a little bit tinny. Overall however, I’d categorize the tonal balance of this
phone as average (a recurring theme in this review). It falls far short of the
gorgeous quality I noted in the Motorola PEBL a couple of months ago, and it
isn’t quite as good-sounding as the recently-tested
Sony-Ericsson W300i, but it comes close.
Throughout the many real-life phone calls I participated in using the TG800F I
never found myself wishing I’d used something else. I did wish it sounded a bit
nicer, but overall it was easy to live with from day to day.
Sound Reproduction: Once again, this aspect of the
phone is only average. Nuances of speech are generally reproduced accurately,
and it has very little background hiss (except at the highest volume setting).
There does seem to be a bit of electronic background noise when the backlight is
on, but it isn’t particularly noticeable unless you use the phone in a very
quiet room.
Earpiece Volume: On this score the phone does very
well, with my only complaint being that there are too few volume gradients. One
setting may be a bit too loud, while the next lowest may be not loud enough.
Aside from that however, the native earpiece can generate clean sound at volumes
most phones only dream of. It therefore works very well in loud environments,
except that the sound gets harsher as the volume increases.
Outgoing Audio: Sadly, this is one aspect of the
audio that’s noticeably sub-par. My own recordings to voicemail, as well as
comments from various people I spoke to using the phone, demonstrated that the
TG800F has rather fuzzy-sounding audio quality that’s also a little faint. One
caller described it as sounding like I wasn’t talking directly into the
microphone. Everyone agreed it wasn’t loud enough.
When background noise is present the phone does even worse. I made test
recordings from my car at highway speeds and even with the windows closed (where
virtually all other phones don’t pass on any background noise to the caller) the
TG800F was making it sound like I was driving in an open roadster. When I opened
my window the wind and tire noise from the highway almost completely blotted out
my voice. While I’ve heard worse outgoing performance on a few low-end CDMA
phones, I’ve never heard quite such a bad showing from a GSM phone.
Speakerphone: Despite this being a defacto standard on virtually all phones
these days, and despite the fact that you can play MP3 files through the
earpiece at perfectly listenable levels, the TG800F does not have a speakerphone
feature.
Stereo Earbuds: I tried out the stereo earbuds
(with built-in microphone) provided with the phone and I was really not that
impressed. When used to talk on the phone the volume is way too low and the
overall quality is noticeably worse than with the native earpiece. When the
earbuds are used to listen to MP3 files however, I found a total lack of
low-end. I’ve tested earbuds with incredible bass response, and so the
limitation isn’t due to the style of the earpieces. There also wasn’t much
high-end either.
Just to see if the problem was the phone or the buds, I connected them up to my
Motorola i580. In phone mode the earbuds
produced enough volume to make me go deaf, and so clearly the TG800F has
extremely low earphone output level. I then played MP3 files on my i580 and they
were also very loud. There was a still a complete lack of bass, and so that was
evidently the fault of the earbuds. Overall however, sound quality from my i580
was vastly superior to the sound quality from the TG800F in both phone and MP3
modes (as well as being markedly louder). That being the case, I rather doubt
that getting a higher-quality headset is going to help much.
Click on this link for a full description of
Audio Performance, and how to interpret it.
Support Features
Ringer Volume: Like most of the audio aspects of
this phone, the ringers were average. They were loud enough to hear in many
day-to-day situations, but they were mostly inaudible in loud environments such
as out on a busy street or in a crowded food court at the mall. Most of the
available ringers had a la-de-da sort of sound to them and none were adequate
for outdoors use.
Keypad Design: Technically there two different
keypads on this phone and each warrants its own critique. The number keys are
standard mechanical types that are exposed when the phone is slid open. They are
well-spaced, but for the most part they are flush and it is difficult to discern
one from the other strictly by feel. All of these keys pressed well and did
their jobs in an accurate fashion, but they are a little mushy and are a bit
short on solid tactile feel.
One of my biggest complaints about the numeric keypad had nothing to do with its
physical construction, but rather the phone’s slow response to them during a
call. When you must type digits during a call (such as those times when you have
to key-in information) the lag time between pressing a key and hearing the
touchtone is longer than on any phone I’ve ever tested. I could find no way to
turn off the tones (even if you turn off key sounds completely), and so there is
no way to bypass this issue.
The second keypad is really the selling point of the Chocolate line. On the face
of the phone, immediately below the screen, are a series of touch-sensitive keys
that really have no physical existence except for light-up symbols. Whenever the
keys are active, the lights behind them are on. If the lights are off, there are
effectively no keys there. They aren’t really touch-sensitive, in that they
don’t use pressure to actuate. They appear to be proximity sensors, and because
of that they do not work if you are wearing even thin driving gloves.
Based on my usual criteria for judging keypads, the touch-sensitive keys fail
outright for having no tactile feel and there is no way to find them without
looking at them (the ring around the OK button doesn’t count, because if you
feel around for your position on the pad, you will activate keys you didn’t
intend to). However, this type of keypad is a concept in its own right and
doesn’t deserve to be judged in the same way as a mechanical keypad. Just the
same, I wish to warn potential buyers that they should at least try the phone
out before they purchase one to make sure they are comfortable with the keys and
the way they work.
After I became accustomed to the keys I found that they worked fairly well.
There were a few issues that cropped up occasionally but I could not readily
duplicate them. For example, on at least 3 different occasions I slid open the
phone and it went ahead and dialed the last number I’d called. I thought that
might be because I’d had my thumb on the TALK button when I slid it open, but
deliberate attempts to reproduce the problem failed.
On at least 3 other occasions I called voicemail and when I went to enter
touchtones I found myself in the middle of entering a text message. The
touch-sensitive keys are normally turned off during a call, but they are
re-activated if you press a numeric key. This means that if you have to enter
digits at multiple times throughout a call, you will run into trouble with your
cheek activating the touch-sensitive keys.
So it seems that the touch-sensitive keys are an okay idea that needs a little
bit more work. Whether you like them or not will generally be a matter of
personal taste and your tolerance to the problems they sometimes produce.
Display: The color display is a 262,000-color TFT
unit with a resolution of 220 x 176 (a very common size for Motorola phones).
When the backlight is off, the display appears black and it blends in with the
black of the surrounding case, thus making it seem as though the phone doesn’t
have a screen. Brightness is good, but not exceptional and so it’s really tough
to see in bright sunlight. You’ll also have trouble seeing the markings on the
touch-sensitive keys in bright sunlight, but hopefully by then you’ll have
memorized what they do.
Icing on the Cake
Camera: Before I comment on the camera I wish to
point out one of the most bizarre piece of engineering I’d yet encountered. When
the phone is held upright, thus displaying a camera image that is taller than it
is wide (portrait mode) the picture you end up taking is actually longer than it
is high (landscape mode). When you turn the phone sideways to see a landscape
view of what the camera sees, you end up with a portrait picture. Not only is
this really confusing, it also means that the screen is cutting off a fair chunk
of the picture, even when you are setting up to take a shot.
Another particularly annoying aspect of the camera is the long delay between
pressing the shutter button and when the photograph is actually taken. You’ll
get used to it, but you’ll never completely feel comfortable with it.
All that said however, this is a not a half-bad camera (in bright conditions).
It has very low digital noise, which is great for taking low-light pictures, but
I just couldn’t get those types of shots to look sharp. All of my low-light
shots, no matter how carefully I tried to hold the phone still, were blurry.
Shots taken in bright sunlight look sharp and have excellent color balance.
The following 2 pictures demonstrate that the LG TG800F has much better color balance than my i580, but it has a greater fisheye effect:
Shot out the window with the TG800F
Shot out the window
with the i580
MP3 Player: One big difference between the TG800F
on Fido and the model sold by Telus is that the Fido model DOES NOT have a
MicroSD slot. Subsequently you can not add extra memory to the phone and you are
stuck with the measly 128 MB that come with it. This memory is shared between
all forms of multimedia data, including videos, photos, and music.
It’s just as well you don’t have that much space to store MP3 files, because the
player on the TG800F is a pretty basic bit of software. It does not read the ID3
tags from your files, and so all you get is one big play list consisting solely
of the filenames of each MP3. There is no way to sort your songs by artist,
album title, or genre.
Despite a lack of external memory however, getting MP3 files onto the phone is a
snap. Just plug the provided USB cable into your computer and the phone appears
as an external mass storage device (there isn’t even a need to load drivers).
Putting MP3 files onto the phone, or copying photographs off of it, is no more
difficult than dragging and dropping them in Explorer (or whatever application
you use).
Conclusions
If everything about the TG800F was merely average, I’d still recommend it, but
it fails so uttering when it comes to outgoing audio that I have trouble
endorsing this model. You’ll constantly punish your callers with mediocre sound
quality at the best of times, and horrible problems when background noise is
present.
Most of the desirability of this phone is derived from the touch-sensitive
keypad, but if you are the type that reads my review of phones to find out how
well they work as phones, then you won’t be likely to choose a glitzy feature
over mediocre performance.
