Cell Phones Blog

Design

Although the VX8300 looks chunky at first glance, it’s fairly light at 3.9 ounces. It measures 3.6 x 1.9 x 1 inches-a size that provides more real estate for the two displays. The external screen measures 1.4 inches and delivers 65,000 colors and 96 x 96 pixels. The internal screen is two inches with 262,000 colors and 176 x 220 pixels. Though this clamshell phone has an external antenna, it’s comfortable to use. With music controls on the outside, you won’t have to flip open the phone to pause tunes.

Features

The handset comes with a 1.3-MP camera, 28MB of internal memory, a microSD Card slot, and stereo Bluetooth. For earbuds and a USB cable for PC synching (or for using the phone as modem), you need to buy Verizon’s $30 Music Essentials Kit or another compatible set of accessories.

Performance

Within Verizon’s EV-DO range, the phone downloaded videos impressively fast. Launching the V CAST Video channel listing typically took 12 to 15 seconds, and then a 1.5-minute video from YouTube or Revver, for example, took only six seconds to load. A 2.5-minute CNN news clip loaded within seven seconds. Loading the V CAST Music page took five to six seconds. The video quality was smooth and reasonably sharp overall, but we noticed some banding, and in a few videos the subject was slightly off focus. Downloading a song was poky, usually taking 40 seconds. The phone’s dual speakers sounded terrific during both music and video playback.

Verdict

The LG VX8300 is a great value-priced phone for video junkies, but music lovers will need to deal with sluggish song downloads.