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LG AX830 Glimmer
Conclusion:
The Glimmer (AX830) comes from a company, LG, with a reputation for quality products and it does not disappoint. The phone has a touch screen which enables quick menu navigation and it is quite the stylish phone. The Glimmer also contains a full multimedia suite, boasting a 2.0 megapixel camera/camcorder as well as an mp3 player. With the Glimmer LG does an excellent job of packing a small phone with a lot of features. The phone isn’t intended to be a PDA or a Blackberry type phone, instead it seems aimed at those who like an iPhone type device, but aren’t yet willing to give up all of their buttons. In that respect the Glimmer is very versatile, one can easily do any task with either the touch screen or the keypad. While almost every aspect of the Glimmer was perfect there were a few things that bothered me about it. The first was the conspicuous lack of arrow navigation. This forces you to occasionally use the touchpad, but it can become very frustrating when you typed “there” instead of “these” and need to carefully place the cursor between the ‘r’ and the ‘e’. This can prove to be a very difficult task that makes text messaging cumbersome at times. Another thing worth noting is that even though the phone can act as a full mp3 player, you cannot set an mp3 as your ringtone, in order to do this you have to use BitPim or QPST to load the ringtones onto the phone. This struck me as a clear area for improvement, but I also believe it is Altell that imposed this restriction on LG. Despite my suspicion that it isn’t LG’s fault, I think it is still noteworthy because if you’re getting a Glimmer you also have to get Alltel.
My last complaint is a minor gripe, but one that bothers me nonetheless. Occasionally if when you close the Glimmer it simply shuts off, this doesn’t happen often and seems to only happen at the worst possible times. I have rewritten countless text messages due to this issue. I think the issues I had with the Glimmer we’re all relatively minor, if you don’t send thousands of text messages a month I’d even call my complaints trivial. To be fair to LG, this isn’t a phone made for the texting load I place on it, so if you’re a text-a-holic you may want to consider a phone with a full QWERTY keyboard instead. However, all things considered, the Glimmer is a fantastic phone; I’d recommend it to any Alltel customer. If you’re not an Alltel customer and your contract is nearing its expiration I would suggest looking into the different phones LG offers for Alltel customers including the Glimmer. It is feature packed with price that is about what one would expect for a brand new touch-screen phone, $419.99 MSRP. Of course, if you sign your life away to Alltel I know they will cut you a deal.
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