LG Revolution 4G Android Phone (Verizon Wireless)

LG's Revolution May 30, 2011

Reviewer:  Pete L. 

LG hasn't really been known in the past for their high end phones. Usually you have seen them mainly in the freebie bins. Though with the recent releases of both the X2 and now the Revolution it seems that LG is trying to change the way they are precieved. And in my eyes, they have done well so far.

I am going to say this right off the bat, the battery is neither horrible nor is it great. Unplugged at 7AM the battery with moderately heavy usage it usually makes it past 6PM with around 10% left. Thats with a few phone calls, moderate surfing (I live and work in a 4G area and usually have 2-4 bars) running of apps/games and of course some Netflix and HBO GO usage. Some days vary though and I need to recharge before 6PM. So as with any other LTE phone, you may want to have a spare charger around with you. Keep in mind though, my battery is in no way fully conditioned, so hopefully it will improve some. With the battery thing out of the way you will be greeted with a spectacular phone. The screen is crisp and clear. Not as good as the Droid Charge, but hands down superior to the HTC Thunderbolt.

The phone also comes with 16GB internal storage which is the most of any of the current LTE offerings. This phone also scores higher than both of the other devices in Quadrant usually getting me 2100. Granted not dual core territory, but great for a single core. Menus, games and the internet move quickly and smoothly. And chances are if you are looking at this phone, LTE is probably the most imporant thing on your mind.

The phone , like the other LTE devices, ships with Froyo 2.2.2 and hopefully Gingerbread will be out shortly. Lg has been speedy in getting Gingerbread out for the X2 so hopefully they'll have the same diligence with the Revolution, but we can only speculate with that. The phone also has VoLTE built in, which is nice but the sevice won't be turned on until next year.

A quick run down of differences/advantages between the current LTE phones:
Screen - (Droid Charge with the Super AMOLED+)
Screen/Menu Responsiveness - (LG revolution)
4G Speed - (All Even)
3G Speed - (Revolution has the newest verisons)
3G Data and Voice - (Thunderbolt can only do this)
VoLTE - (Revolution only, but again the service is turned off)
Battery Life Usage - (Charge 660min > Revolution 435min> Thunderbolt 378min)
RAM - (Thunderbolt & Revolution @ 768MB, Charge @ 512MB)
Onboard Memory - ( Revolution @ 16GB/14GB (installed/usable) Thunderbolt @ 8GB/2.5GB Charge 2GB/??)
Max Memory - (Revolution 48GB, Thunderbolt 40GB, Charge 34GB)
Camera - (Charge by far has superior Cameras than not only both phones but mostly every phone currently available save the Galaxy S II)
Netflix - (Revolution only)
HDMI - ( Revolution & Charge only)

All in all, you'll have advantages in some areas and will fall short in others. The Revolution is a well rounded LTE offering and in my opinion was enough to warrant a purchase and 2 year contract from me. If you're looking to get the fastest phone out there, you may want to look at one of the new dual core offerings, but know this, you'll be stuck on 3g. If you want LTE and want to lock yourself into unlimited 4g before Verizon switches over to tiered internet this should be your phone of choice. Dreams of a dual core phone with unlimited LTE support most likely got killed with the delay of the Bionic.

better than most June 7, 2011

Reviewer:  bigchipsHI 

(updated 4 months later)
At first when I got this phone, I wanted to trade it in because the battery life was bad, like 4 hours of usage and it would be almost dead bad. But after weeks of tweaking on it and downloading apps like Watchdog Lite and Juice Defender I have since more than doubled the battery life and could go a whole day without a recharge. Just dont forget to turn off the 3g and 4g when your not using it. average users can get by just fine without 4g at all even.

*switched launcher to golauncher and phone works even better and faster, a must for all revolution owners. best part about golauncher? changes search button (originally bing) to google search. thank you baby jesus.

pros :
phone is fast, no lag like my original droid. (theres some lag now but still fast and doesnt bother me)
feels good in hand, not too big or heavy. although most cases tend to take the slimness away
screen is nice and big
4g mobile hotspot, very niiice. can use with 3g as well (learned this cost extra $30/mo after 1st free month, had to cancel and get refund, still a cool option though. could be money saver if i could cancel internet at home and just use this for internet)
camera placement, fingers wont get in the way
bright led light

cons :
phone volume is average to weak, idk what other people are talking about but I find it much harder to hear the rings, speakerphone, and even in call volume. but not unbearable.

small problems
(worth noting but shouldnt decide wether or not you should buy phone):
still have to shut down phone every 3-4 days and restart to have it run smoothly, no biggie at all
lots of apps you cannot delete or get rid of, bing sucks as search button/navigator. cant change it either but there are on screen widgets to get around this
lot of apps still dont support the revolution (yet anyway), had some problems already. mostly with video chat.
lg's UI could be better
without case phone tended to slide out of my pocket when getting up from seats
preinstalled facebook for LG is wack, download facebook for android

for the price, your not going to find a phone that can do as much that is still fast and has a good size screen. my mom ended up getting one after finally deciding to switch to a smartphone from a basic flip phone. she hasnt stopped playing with it after two weeks, she loves it. not to mention shes 50 and is not really handy when it comes to electronics.

Overall Good Phone July 28, 2011

Reviewer:  ThatGuy 

I have had the LG revolution for 2.5 weeks, and overall the phone is pretty good.

Speed - It is not laggy (the reason why I didn't want to by the charge was that it was very laggy in store vs the Revo). I get quadrant scores of 1900-2080 without any modifications. I've played a variety of 3D games, and had absolutely no issues. Internet browsing is phenomenal with 4G. Best download speed was 10mb/s (average 4-6), worst was 2mb/s. Best upload was 6mb/s (average 2mb/s, but upload is a lot more inconsistent than download speeds), worst upload was 125kb/s.

Battery Life - For regular usage I usually get about 12-14 hours of usage before it is dead (this is why I chose it over the TB, I know people who have it, and with similar usage they were seeing about 3-4 hours less of use). I do some texting, check work email throughout day during meetings, and usually play a game for about an hour (like ab, or other random ones). When using the phone aggressively with browsing and streaming and games pretty much non stop it can be used up within 6-8 hours. If I do not touch the phone it drops an average of 2-3% per hour, so based on that I think you'd get about 30 hours stand-by time (my work email is still syncing with it in background, and I have advanced task killer killing apps once an hour). With that said I've watched the battery charge closely (wall charger) and it takes 2.5 hours with the phone on for a full charge from zero, so every minute of charging gets you 5 minutes of use. But when I turn the phone off, the phone charges fully in 1 hour, so every minute of charging gets you 14 minutes of use. Also turning it to 3G showed some improvement, I got about 2 more hours of average use out of it, but when I browsed the internet it was just so slow compared to 4G, so I no longer turn off 4G. I did use speaker phone one day for an hour straight, and it drained the battery by about 10% (not bad at all).

Call Quality - Calls are fine, volume is good, and speaker phone volume is good. I have had 1 instance where someone didn't hear me completely, not sure if it was this phone or there's.

Notification light - This feature should be standard on all phones, so thankfully the Revo has it.

HDMI Output - This worked great, I tried it with Netflix, angry birds. It doesn't just show multimedia; it shows the phones screen as well. Honestly this is probably the one time I will every use the HDMI output, but still not to shabby.

Netflix Quality - This is a nice feature, now available on almost any phone that is worth buying. But with my use on 4g it streams well, there are points where it seems to be running maybe at a bit of a lower frame rate that is noticeable, but nothing that really affects my viewing experience. Also I do have to turn off auto for the display brightness and have to put it on max brightness, once again not a big deal for the 5-6 times a month I watch something on Netflix on here.

Screen - It is bright, not too bad. If you are always outside, it is readable, but this is where the Droid Charge screen dominated. It is very glossy, so I bought a screen protector with anti glare. 4.3" screen is nice, a bit awkward for one hand texting.

Build Design/Quality - Phone feels very sturdy. The rubberized material on the back feels nice, but one note is a very small part of the rubberized material on my phone started rubbing off already. Not sure why, it has never encountered a solid surface rubbing against it, this is the one thing that actually disappointed me. Otherwise one small thing is the charging ports have covers. I had an LG as my last phone, and it had the same design for the charging port, and made it 2 years no problem without any signs that it would fall off.

UI - The LG UI some people have said they dislike on reviews some don't mind it, I think ultimately it is basic. The Apps area I have seen people state it doesn't show things alphabetically, but you can change that by choosing list on the settings in there. Screen transitions are fast. The most annoying thing this phone has is the messaging program that comes with it. When you get a text it opens the keyboard right away, and almost hides the entire text that just came. The intent was to be able to text back without having to hit a button for the keyboard. The LG keyboard isn't too bad, I can type fast with it, but as for the word recognition, I've seen better. The screen lock feature wasn't an issue until I read a forum where someone mentioned they get success about 50% of the time. I didn't even notice but that is absolutely true, if you wait one second before trying it works fine (so it is related to some sort of load time to turning screen on and being ready to be unlocked, widget locker shall remedy this). Gingerbread will come out eventually, supposedly. To be honest the phone works well, and I have not run into any issues without having gingerbread yet, so this is really not a big deal (only big deal with it is the ideology that an OS that is a year'ish old should be put on new equipment. It should be on there, but it really doesn't change anything for me either way)...

Bing - Not completely sure what the deal with putting Bing on the phone, but all items on the screen are customizable. The one integration that everyone uses that you cannot change without rooting is in the standard browser, when you type in address bar section to search it uses Bing. Some people just use other browsers anyways so it's a non issue. For me I don't mind I just use the Google search bar widget (which I would have used anyways), or occasionally Bing if I am already browsing (it's not that bad...)

Camera - This isn't to bad, for a cell phone camera I am happy. If I had an 8 Megapixel (like the charge), I know the extra quality wouldn't affect the random pictures I take, quality is still good enough to be crisp on the Revo 5 megapixel. The flash works well. The zoom works well. The features within the camera app are pretty good. There is a Panoramic feature, but this is absolutely useless, it creates a picture but it has overlap and some areas that show double, I tried it about 20 times and still couldn't get 1 picture that would be usable. Front facing camera, works seems fine.

So compared to all the other 4G LTE's as of today, it's faster than the Droid Charge (I was on the fence to get the Charge, but I just can't stand lag. The charge just gets to laggy very quickly, But the droid charge has a lot more development going on which will possibly remedy this, and the battery on the Droid Charge is significantly better), Revos battery lasts longer than the TB (Between the TB and this they are extremely similar all around, minus the battery, and the TB has more development going on). The Bionic is coming out shortly, but the price tag vs. what I paid for the Revo covers my Netflix subscription for the next 2 years for streaming, or lets me cancel my contract earlier to get a better phone in a year. And anyways the software needing dual core still has a ways to go for variety and quantity (the phone isn't 100% future proof, but I think it is 2 year proof). For a single core phone, it is as fast as it gets. Overall this phone has yet to disappoint.

Love the phone but the jury is still out June 15, 2011

Reviewer:  H. Petrelli "hmwende"  (Bradenton, FL) -

Pros - Swype, pinch, netflix, folder organization/customize,LED indicator, camera features, storage, VoLTE
Cons - Battery, slow internet

I was a loyal Blackberry user and when my contract came due decided to jump ship solely to check out the 4G network and because I have found myself at a disadvantage not having the variety and quality of apps offered by Droid and iPhone. I decided against the iPhone beause of it's lack of wireless sync capabilities and removable battery. However, depending on how this goes, will switch to the iPhone because of it's reliability and secure applications as opposed to the open Droid market, which makes your phone vulnerable to viruses.

I use my phone mostly for work email, web surfing and light gaming such as angry birds. Several things about the Droid that are not as convenient as the Blackberry is that the Blackberry was designed such that actions are accomplishable with very few key presses such as changing sound profiles. Also, email reconciliation is not nearly as easy. I'm used to having the option of deleting emails off of both my handheld and the account. On the Droid, because it is synced to your home email account, whatever is on that home email account, is what is on your device. I spent time deleting emails and then right away, they were back on the handheld. One way around this is to move items to your email folders - create a "deleted" email folder and then when you get to work delete the contents manually. This is a pain, because who wants to read their emails twice? Once on the phone and once on the email when you get to work to reconcile it. The copy and paste feature on the Droid is extremely limited. You can't copy a line out of an email and paste it into another email. That is disappointing.

Things I love on the LG Revolution: Swype technology, pinch technology, Netflix comes pre-loaded, and the most important thing is being able to organize all the apps into categories and folders. To my knowledge, this is the only Droid that allows this feature, and coming from a Blackberry, this is a Major plus!!! I also love that it has an LED indicator light. Again to my knowledge, this is the only 4G Droid that Verizon carries with that feature. I received misinformation about this from the Verizon customer service reps - I went to three stores to inquire about this phone and no one could tell me any specifics about the phone that make it different from the rest. I even pointed out the indicator light to a guy asking if that is indeed what it was and he said no, it only tells you if it is plugged in. And I've noticed that it is red when it is pluggled in, green when it is charged, and blue when I have a new message and it is off when there are no messages. I also love the notification center. I can swipe down from the top of the main screen and not only see what I have that is new, but I can click on it and it will take me direcly to it. The screen is crisp and clear, not as good as the Charge, but hands down superior to the HTC Thunderbolt. The LG also comes with 16GB internal storage which is the most of any of the LTE offerings. This phone also scores higher than both of the other devices in Quadrant usually getting me 2100. Granted not dual core territory, but great for single core. Menus and games move quickly and smoothly. I also really love the camera with advanced settings. I realize it's a 5 megapixel and the Droid has 8 - but in comparison, my Blackberry had 3 and I'm very happy with the Revolution. Besides, this will only matter if you plan on downloading your photos and expanding them. Most of my photos I keep on my phone. I also love that the phone has VoLTE built in, which is nice but the service won't be turned on until next year. This was a huge selling point for me because it's the only Verizon LTE that has this feature.

Things I don't love - this is just an adjustment, but it is not as intuitive as the Blackberry - the developers didn't think of every little thing like they do with Blackberry. Instead, all the functionality exists, but through individual applications. But this is a function of the Droid software and not an issue with the phone itself. I don't mind the battery as much. It is middle of the road between HTC (worst) and Charge (best). I have a car charger and a computer cable, so I have it plugged in all the time. But I leave the house at 8am and have to plug it in at 2:30 after only very light use. Initially, I was really unhappy with Bing. I tried to override the system by downloading Google apps. However, what I found is the system didn't like Google as a web browser and took forever load pages. With Bing it was much better, so I've learned to deal with it. I'm also experiencing VERY SLOW internet speeds in general, which might have been a function of the above attempt to override - after the below issues I did a hard factory settings reset and it improved a little but not much. The 3G is taking about 40 seconds to load, which is 4 times slower than my Blackberry 3G. I also "raced" a friend on her iPhone with 3G and in every case her websites popped up at least one second before me. 4G is better but it is equivalent to the 3G on my Blackberry and I expected much faster. So, I called Verizon and they seem to think it is odd and that the problem might be with my unit. I will test the new one to find out if the problem still exists, if so, then that will be a deal-breaker for me and I'll be switching to the iPhone.

One issue I have with the software and not with the phone is GoogleVoiceSearch. It works great for website interface, but does not accurately utilize the commands of "call" "text" or "email" utilizing my contacts. So I downloaded the contacts to gmail (which can be done easily using the "share" feature), but that didn't work either. I went to the store to test this out on the Charge and found the same thing, so this is not a problem with the LG, but rather with the Droid software.
Before getting the Revolution I compared the Thunderbolt and the Charge. All of the Verizon salespeople tried to convince me into the Charge, but I feel that it's only because of the screen. People seem to be drawn to pretty lights. It really is incredible but it is the only thing that is better than the others. Based on the specs alone, it's obvious that the Revolution is a superior phone, the salespeople just haven't been trained on the phone and it hasn't been out there long enough to really identify the differences. The HTC only has a kickstand - everything else is inferior to the previously two phones. The poor battery life took it immediately out of the running for me.

Great phone May 30, 2011

Reviewer:  mojojoejoe 

I bought this phone the day it came out and so far i have no regrets. the phone is quite big but feels good in hand, has good build quality. the display is very nice and bright. i like the LG UI, most people may not but i think it's pretty easy to use, pretty plain and simple. in the apps menu the icons are in separate catagories that you can expand and minimize so you dont just have 3 pages of junk to scroll through, you can also add, delete and rename catagories and move your icons between them. i thought it was a nice touch because i cover my home screens in large widgets and don't have many shortcuts so it saves me from searching through all my apps. the 1Ghz processor handles everything with ease, there's a little lag from time to time but i've seen that from dual core phones as well. of course there are some things i don't like, the main dislike being the keyboard, don't care for swype either, but no big deal downloaded gingerbread keyboard for free in market. another downside is the camera, only 5 MP, again no big deal, i have two cameras that are better than any phone camera. also the battery life is a little shorter than on my droid and i don't have 4G in my area yet so it is only going to get worse, but right now it's good enough. as far as the weight, i don't seem to notice any extra heft, it's only 6 ounces. great phone definitely recommend.