Great Phone Bad Camera

Author's Rating:

Pros: Sleek, stylish, thin, light weight

Cons: Shuts off on it's own occasionally, bad camera, weird plug in for the charger

The Bottom Line: 
Great little phone for talking. Internet use is okay, bad camera. But I really like it.

Author's Review
I have had my 8700 for a year now and for the most part enjoy it. This is the second LG I have had and I have been pretty happy with both. It is sleek, stylish and fits in my pocket without too much bulk. There are a few complaints though.

I carry my cell in my pants pocket usually and this phone is thin enough and light weight enough to be able to do this. I really like the stainless steel look not to mention a little more durable than the usual cell phone. I drop my phone about once a week and it has held up really well. I think it has about 44MB available on it. Which is about the right amount for me.

The screen is good sized and color. The menus are easy to navigate and you can change the buttons on the main screen to what you use the most. It has voice recognition so you can speak the name of the person you want to call and it will dial that person. The call quality is great and mine hooked up to my bluetooth ear piece just fine. I really never got the hang of the ear piece so I can't speak to it too much but it worked when I attempted to be a part of the craze. The buttons are easy to push, I have long fingernails and the flat pad makes it a lot easier for me to use. There is an outside display that tells you who is calling and the time when no one is calling. Texting works really well on this phone. It does have T9 if you like that. It has a voice recorder, camera and video recorder.

The camera is a 2.0 mega pixel. I know I shouldn't expect too much from a camera on a phone but the picture really don't turn out all that well if they are something you are going to want to print out later. They are very grainy. We ended up having a our baby unexpectedly 6 weeks early and this phone was all we had. It worked in a pinch but it's not something you want to be using on important pictures. This camera also has no flash (which my old one did) so you have to have good lighting if you want to take a picture. So it is great for pictures that you are just texting to someone else but not for the family photos. There is a button on the outside of the phone to access the camera so if you are in a hurry you can take a picture quick.

Talk time and battery time are perfect for me. I can go 2 or 3 days without charging my battery with just average use. If I spend 45 min or an hour on it I will want to charge it that night otherwise I will be pretty low by the end of the next day. I owned this phone for a year before I got a car charger because I never needed it. Matter of fact I still haven't taken the car charger out of the package.

While I have the ability to use the internet on this phone I don't use it a whole lot. However I did get a decent view of webpages on it. CNN worked great but more complicated pages like Myspace did not come out as well. This phone also has the capability to store and play music. I have an iPod so I never use this feature and can not speak to it. It also has the ability to get V-Cast videos but again I never use this feature so I do not know how well that works.

A few complaints I have about it are that it seems to shut off randomly if I am trying to text or send a picture. This happens about once a month. I have no explanation for it but because it happens so little it doesn't bother me too much. Another thing I would like to see improved is where you plug it in to charge it. It has no cradle and there is a little cap over the charging hole. I honestly have no idea how a person without fingernails gets this cap off. Because of the amount of use that little cap gets I keep expecting it to break but so far so good. The connection for the charger is kinda like a USB port but smaller, sometimes it is hard to put the charger in. I feel like I have to push it in harder than I would like to and am afraid I am going to break something however I have been doing this for a year and still it works. The phone can get hot if you talk on it for more than 30 minutes. I think all phones probably do this but because it is metal instead of plastic I think it is apparent sooner.