My recent experiment with Cricket Mobile and having “just a phone” was not exactly a stellar success. Cricket themselves were a perfectly serviceable phone company. They had reasonable rates, but frustratingly basic phones. Coming from an iPhone, I didn’t realize just how much I used my phone for more that just “phone” stuff. In fact, over the last few years my iPhone had become pretty much a mobile entertainment device that only sometimes took calls.
I decided that the closest experience I was going to get to an iPhone without the ridiculous price was Google’s Android OS. I researched inexpensive Android handsets, and one model continued to pop up in searches: the LG Optimus. It has received mostly positive reception on other carriers (Sprint, T-Mobile, Virgin Mobile), and recently Cricket started selling their own version, the Optimus C.
I called up Cricket to find out where I could buy it, and the guy on the phone told me I couldn’t. It wasn’t available in my area yet. I asked him what that meant, and he couldn’t offer any more information. I’m in Texas, and apparently the Optimus C just doesn’t exist. He also didn’t know when we’d get it.
My local Best Buy, Target, and Radio Shack all sold another model of the LG Optimus, the Optimus V, off the shelf for $200. I looked at the plans offered by Virgin Mobile for the phone and found them quite competitive, so my first trip after work that day was to Target.
Hardware:
Out of the box you get the phone, a pair of headphones with a microphone/volume button, a 2GB microSD card (preinstalled) with a full-size SD adapter, a USB cable and USB wall brick, and some manuals.
The phone feels good and solid in my hand. It’s not too light, which is good for a $200 device. It’s not going to win any aesthetic awards, but it doesn’t look ugly. The body is graphite black with gunmetal accents on the top and sides. The buttons on the front are ringed with shiny chrome.
The front buttons are typical of most Android devices: Menu, Home, Back and Search. Along the right side are dedicated buttons for the camera and voice commands, as well as a volume rocker. The power button is on the top. All the buttons felt solid and didn’t wiggle or clack while handling the phone (something I noticed with the camera button on my Samsung Messager Touch).
The processor isn’t the snappiest, and most notably lacks the ability to play Flash video. However for most of the tasks I performed on my iPhone, the LG Optimus is right on par. I swapped out the included 2G microSD for a 4GB stick and it gave me no problems.
The charger is a USB wall plug, so I didn’t need to buy a separate car charger (I had a USB plug for my iPhone). I tested it with several wall plug USB adapters and all of them seemed to work fine. I noticed a significant difference in recharge time when going from a USB plug on a computer to the wall adapter.
I know the wall adapter can pull more power, but on the iPhone it was never that big of a difference. With the LG, my charge times are cut in half or more. I topped off a mostly dead battery from the wall in about an hour a half.
Once I turned off some things I didn’t need (GPS location services, Bluetooth, Wifi) and reduced the screen brightness I was able to get better battery life than what came out of the box. Before optimizing it took me just thirty minutes of browsing and app downloading to suck the battery to half charge.
After optimizing I get a few hours. It depends on what I’m doing, of course. Since I’m not a big talker I can’t say for sure how long the phone lasts just on voice, but since most of the things I’ve done on it seem to use about as much data as on my iPhone, I’d recommend looking at numbers for that.
My Samsung WEP 700 Bluetooth headset paired up and worked as expected. The headphones included in the box had decent sound quality, but they were just too chunky and unattractive for me. I plugged in a pair of Sony earbuds with a microphone and volume rocker that I used quite a bit on my iPhone (model MDR-EX38i).
The microphone worked fine. I could click the button to hang up a call. Clicking also let me advance to the next track in Pandora and the default music app, just like the iPhone. It’s a little curious that the only function that didn’t work was the volume adjustment, but according to the box these headphones were specifically designed for the iPhone. Three out of four isn’t bad in that context. I’m seriously considering a pair of stereo Bluetooth headphones anyway.
Software:
The Optimus V comes with Android 2.2.1 out of the box, and pretty much all the UI is plain vanilla. The only Virgin-branded things I noticed were the Virgin Download App (which is useless) and the Activate widget (which is only useful once).
I was pleasantly surprised to see that once I set up my Gmail account, all my Gmail phone contacts were synced to the phone automatically. That saved me a lot of entry time. Android really likes to connect to Google, so if you have Google Calendar entries or use other Google apps (Voice, Talk) it picks up on all of those as well.
Google Talk was a little annoying at first, because it insisted on logging me in to the service automatically. I never use Google Talk, and I have it turned off when I use Gmail. I had to open the Google Talk app on the phone and tell it specifically not to auto-login, otherwise it would constantly respawn and tell me various people wanted to chat.
Pandora worked beautifully, and for the handful of games I downloaded (Angry Birds, of course) performance was good. I did notice some slowdown when I zoomed my view out in Angry Birds Rio. Oh well, I plan on using the iPad as my gaming device anyway.
Coming from an iPhone and Apple’s extremely closed application setup, I was glad to see that I could not only replace pretty much all of the default Android apps with ones from the Android Marketplace, I could also add other marketplaces. I added Amazon’s App Store immediately, as I was keen on trying out their cloud service (long story short, it’s fun but not especially useful).
Service and Coverage:
Activating the phone was pretty simple. I pulled it out of the box, logged onto the Virgin Mobile website, went to the “Activate” link and answered some questions. I picked a plan, paid for it, and restarted my phone. All was well.
Virgin Mobile offered 3 plans at the time of this rant. Just to try it out, I chose the first, along with the optional $5 insurance plan:
- $25 a month for unlimited data, unlimited text, and 300 minutes
- $40 a month for unlimited data, unlimited text, and 1200 minutes
- $60 a month for unlimited data, unlimited text, and unlimited minutes
Three hundred minutes is roughly ten minutes a day per month. I don’t think I’ll be able to keep that up for long. The 1200 minute plan sounds a bit more realistic, with 40 minutes a day. If I’m really planning on gabbing it up, I’ll shoot for the $60 plan, but I don’t see that happening any time soon.
The nice thing about Virgin Mobile is that there’s no contracts, so I can swap between one plan or the other (and even have no plan at all) whenever I like. Compared to other major carriers that still offer unlimited data plans (Sprint and T-Mobile) Virgin comes out about $30 cheaper for unlimited everything. Both Sprint and T-Mobile carry a version of the LG Optimus (Model S and Model T, respectively).
I intend to make full use the “unlimited” data Virgin advertises to the best of my ability. I’m curious to see if “unlimited” really means “unlimited until we say it’s not.” I’ve run into that with pretty much every cellular data provider I’ve ever used, so I’d be very surprised if Virgin was different.
Pandora is my main vessel for data usage, and it’s quite good at sucking up the bits. While I was on my iPhone, I clocked in 4-6GB a month of mostly Pandora usage, squarely landing me in the “minority 5% who use more than our top data cap.” We’ll see if Virgin Mobile can keep up with me.
Virgin uses Sprint’s network, so I’ve noticed the same kind of coverage patterns as the Cricket phone. That is to say they’re comparable to the signal I got on my iPhone - not great, but adequate everywhere I’ve tried to use the Optimus so far.
Moving Pains:
I was pretty much sold on the Optimus V after my first day of playing with it, so I called the following day to port my phone number to the new handset from Cricket. The process went smoothly and I was changed over in a few hours. At least, that’s what I thought at the time.
The following day, although my Optimus was receiving and sending messages and calls just fine with my ported number, Cricket still reported my account as being active. This concerned me, since my renewal date for Cricket was only a few days away and I didn’t like the idea of paying for a month of a service I no longer use.
I called Cricket, who told me the account would be cancelled automatically as soon as Virgin was done porting my number. Perhaps I just don’t understand the process of porting cell numbers, because I considered the porting done as soon as I could send and receive calls on the new phone with my old number.
When I ported my number from AT&T to Cricket, my account was definitely terminated. Quite roughly, in fact. I had to call AT&T later to fix what happened. Basically, Cricket took my number and severed the account from our family plan, and I was left with one phone using “shared” features that were no longer relevant.
I called Virgin and asked if they were done processing the port request. They said yes, and if Cricket hadn’t cancelled it was on them to do so. Back to Cricket, the finger was once again pointed at Virgin. I began to feel like a schoolyard teacher trying to referee a shouting match. I decided at this point to cut Cricket off at the legs and remove all my auto-bill information. That way, regardless of how long they dragged their feet closing out the account, I wouldn’t have to pay for it.
Conclusion:
The LG Optimus V is a fun, relatively cheap Android phone. It offers enough of the same features as my iPhone that I don’t miss it, and a much more reasonable pricing plan that pretty much makes up for everything else. I like the service I’ve received from Virgin so far, but if it starts to suck later on down the road you’ll be the first to know about it.
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