LG Enlighten

Of course having a smartphone that runs on Verizon’s 4G LTE network is cool as it gives great internet speeds, but it’s a known fact that not everyone is in Verizon’s 4G LTE region of coverage. That means there are many out there who would not be interested in Verizon’s recent array of 4G LTE phones. To put an end to this, the LG Enlighten is released and it is a 3G capable phone with some likeable features like the QWERTY keyboard. Adding to that, you can get it for just $79.99. So let’s find out if LG Enlighten can swing the crowd over in Verizon’s direction.

Design
At 4.5 x 2.3 x 0.58 inches, it is certainly a smaller phone in terms of width and breadth when compared to the likes of Motorola DROID 3 and Motorola DROID PRO, but for some reason it is thicker than both phones. However, that doesn’t pose an issue in holding the LG Enlighten in your hands comfortably. The phone has a rather dull design as it’s fully black in color and there is a smoke-gray chrome rim giving the screen an outline but the color causes it to not standout that much. The display on the LG Enlighten is a 3.2 inch HVGA TFT screen much like the one on LG Vortex and it’s small obviously to help keep the price down. As mentioned previously, this phone comes with a QWERTY keyboard and it slides out. It shares the same spring-loaded mechanism as the one on LG Ally and that means to get the keyboard out you don’t have to push it out all the way.

The keyboard is a 4 row one and it has a row of buttons just for numbers across the top and to make things even better, they are all separate keys instead of being one long membrane. However, it’s a little cramped and you will need some practice to avoid misspelling. Another thing is the space key being separated from the bottom row this means you need your fingers to travel further and that obviously needs some getting used to. On the left of the LG Enlighten is the volume rocker as well as the microUSB port. Meanwhile on the top is the power button plus the standard audio jack and on the right is the dedicated camera button. Flip the phone and you will see a 3.2MP autofocus camera like the one in the LG Vortex.

Features
LG Enlighten shouldn’t be compared with the high end phones as for its price range it packs what it can with a 800MHz CPU to power it. So as expected when we played around with the phone, lag is apparent whenever you jump between homescreens and also when we were opening apps. You get proof in numbers when you run Quadrant benchmark as it scored only 1039 and also 1573 on the AnTuTu benchmark which is very low when compared to other Verizon Android phones.

The nice thing about LG Enlighten is that it comes with the latest Android v2.3.4 Gingerbread, so that’s definitely a reason to cheer about. It’s a great decision by LG and it’s cool that they can give it to you even at a low price. The UI onboard is the Optimus UI 2.0 thus the interface obviously feels a lot like the LG Revolution. The app drawer is the same as in the LG Revolution as it puts your apps in various categories like media and communication for instance but that depends what your preference is as some may like their apps in an alphabetical order. It also has the four colorful icons that sit at the bottom of the seven homescreens. Sadly though, the LG Enlighten does not have as many apps as the LG Revolution. Nevertheless, it still packs a pretty good list like Google search, music, news & weather, power control, traffic and a few others. They are ordinary software, but they work great and for all your Office needs, you can use the Polaris Viewer to open your Word, Powerpoint, Excel and PDF files too! We have a normal music player on the LG Enlighten and it gets the job done and that’s all we need. However, you might be let down by how the speaker performs when you play it at high volumes. You can watch your videos through the gallery app where you can pick which video you would like to watch from the thumbnail view. There’s also the option of the video player app, but we like the one integration in the gallery app.

The LG Enlighten sports a 3.2 inch HVGA TFT display which is small when you compare it to the high end counterparts but let’s not go there. It still does a pretty good job as you can read all the text off it and all the images on it look good. Sadly, LG did not include an ambient light sensor, so you have to manually adjust if you can’t make anything off the screen when you move from dark to bright areas. However, the display does go off when you move it close to your ear when answering a call as it has a proximity sensor.

The camera which the LG Enlighten has is a 3.2MP autofocus camera which is the same us what we had seen previously on LG Vortex and LG Ally. Let’s look at the app first, and we like that it’s simple. You also have quite a few things to play around with like ISO, white balance, and the various modes which are cool. The dedicated camera key that this phone offers is also 2 staged which is amazing as now you can focus on your picture first before shooting away. Photos taken on this camera had good detail when taken on a sunny day however the color was not natural and focus isn’t that good. Pictures taken indoors were just not good, enough said. Video recording is at a 640 x 480 resolution so it’s just an average offering.

The browser is nothing new, as it is the standard WebKit based browser and we are glad to say that it works quite well in reproducing those web sites. However as mentioned in the very beginning of this LG Enlighten review, the phone is running on 3G network so internet speeds are obviously not up to 4G but it’s really good nevertheless.

The performance was the last thing to be tested on the LG Enlighten and we are happy to tell you that call quality is right up there. Audio on both ends of the call were good although we don’t suggest turning the volume up all the way to avoid distortion. It provided some good reception too. The LG Enlighten is given a 1540mAh battery and given the smaller screen size, this is a good offering. Average use of the phone like web browsing and making the odd calls, you can go up to two days without needing a recharge.

Pros and Cons
The HTC Amaze 4G is well built and it also has a brilliant new qHD Super LCD screen. It is also a wonder in terms of speed.

The camera on this phone is a real downer. HTC Amaze 4G’s battery life was also poor.

Conclusion
HTC Amaze 4G definitely manages to place itself at the top of the Android phones category with mind blowing speeds for starters. A better camera would have made it perfect, but either way you get a phone true to its name, amazing.