tech.mchiu.com

Warming up to Korean Electronics

So in the past, I have been pretty partial to buying primarily Japanese branded electronics products, simply because I trust the brand names more. For the notebook PCs I have owned in the past, it has always been Sony or Fujitsu. For stereo equipment, it has been Panasonic, Sony, Kenwood, etc., and with TVs, it has been almost exclusively Sony. I have branched out of the Japanese branded mobile phones after moving to the GSM world (read: the rest of the world but Japan and Korea) so where my phones were made by Toshiba, Sharp, and Kenwood, they are now Nokia or Motorola. Where things really started changing for me I guess, was with the MP3 players, when I bought Creative and iRiver products. iRiver was the interesting one since in the past, I have been pretty much weary of buying Korean branded products because of horror stories I have heard from others about their experiences with Samsung and LG products. But the iRiver products looked so cool and had exactly the specs that I wanted that the Taiwanese and Japanese brands didn't necessarily have. Now, I have taken another big and bold step, and bought my first LG product, which also is my first Korean cell phone: the LG CU500.

This all started because my Treo 650 pretty much died, and put itself into an endless reset loop. Kevin took a look at it, but we both figured that it might be a problem with the SIM interface, and if that were the case, it may not be worth trying to fix. It was definitely one of the most frustrating experiences though. The phone will work every once in a while, but it would only work for 10 minutes or less before throwing itself back into its endless resetting loop, until it ran down its batteries. But more importantly, I simply could not use the phone, and it was a pain in the ass to constantly look for a phone to use whenever I needed to make a phone call, and kind of annoying not being able to send off SMS text messages, e-mail, and other forms of communication that I have become so accustomed to using in my daily life. Actually, I never realized how heavily I used any of these until the 2 days that I was without any access.

So once I had realized that the Treo was pretty much worthless to me, off I went to the Cingular website to see what kinds of phones were available. I am pretty sick of the Moto RAZR and similar phones, not to mention the fact that I don't really like the user interface, so I pretty much ruled out all Motorola products. I wanted to get something from Nokia, but all the good Nokia stuff isn't sold by Cingular for some reason, but I figure it's probably because they are all very pricey, and Cingular only carries the cheap shit. All the Samsung stuff looked pretty boring, and Sony-Erriccson didn't seem to grab my attention either. Finally, I remembered that recently, LG had launched the first HSDPA phone on Cingular, and since I have an all-you-can-eat data plan on my service, I figured that it would be nice to have one of these phones. So it seems like the LG CU500 is the only choice I have, which makes it easy for me to make a decision. Although it means that I have to start texting in T9 format again, I figure that when the next Treo is available on Cingular, I would get one of those in addition to this phone, and use the Treo for business use, and the CU500 for times when I need a smaller phone.

Although the phone is not really RAZR thin, it is still pretty light, and compact enough to go into my pocket without my really knowing it is there. Well, compared to a full-blown smartphone, anything would be pretty light in comparison I guess. It features just about everything you would expect from a modern cell phone, including support for MP3, WMA, and AAC formats, so I guess if I ever really wanted to buy from iTunes, I could play my music back on the cell phone. **UPDATE: just read the instruction manual and other online forums, and it seems that iTunes bought music will not work. ** It also has a 1.3Mpixel camera which also doubles as a video camera, and it has a micro-SD slot for me to hold all that stuff, but not sure whether I would actually take that many pictures. **UPDATE: I did end up buying a 1GB micro-SD card, but haven't really used it yet.** On the messaging side, in addition to SMS/MMS messaging, it also comes included with IM clients for MSN, Yahoo, AOL, and ICQ. I'm not sure if there is any kind of software that can interface it together with a PC, but that would be nice so I don't have to re-input all my contacts. I did look at some online forums that say that the software the ships with the data cable has not yet been updated for the LG CU500 yet, so I guess I will just wait until the software does get updated. So much for being an early adopter.

So in terms of performance, I have noticed that the battery runs down pretty quick. I am not much of a talker, but I notice that by the end of the day, I only have half a charge left, so I definitely need to remember to charge this phone everyday. On the 3G side, it's nice that it tells you whether you are in an area where you connect to 3G, EDGE, or GPRS. EDGE and GPRS work pretty much as I expected... pretty damn slow. But when I am connected to 3G, web pages seem to be violently thrown onto the screen. Luckily, being out here in the SF Bay Area, I can get 3G in a lot of different places, so I can generally browse without being too frustrated. The web browser is pretty standard for any cell phone browser that I have used in the past, so I can't really complain, but with 3G connectivity, it defintely makes the browsing experience a lot nicer. On the IM side, I have only used it with MSN so far, and it works OK. If I am not moving around, it works great... as long as I am connected with full 3G reception, but it does drop out a lot when I am moving around, but I guess that just means that Cingular needs to roll out more 3G networks, so in due time, I am sure that it will be a better experience. The camera works fine, but it lacks a zoom feature, and like most cell phones, does not include a flash or light, making it difficult to take pictures in low lighting conditions. Although I can silence the shutter sound of the camera, what I cannot do is disable the outer LCD panel that shows what I am taking a picture of. I thought this could be a really stealthy camera since the camera lens rotates 180 degrees, so I can adjust to different angles without anyone knowing what I am up to, but I guess with the outer display showing all, there isn't a whole lot I can do... oh well... The MP3 player works fine, and I have used it mainly to import MP3 ringtones I have made. It took me a while to discover that having my ringtone set to the highest level possible is not only annoying, but I get a lot of distortion from the speakers. Maybe next version, they will find a way to build a mini-sub-woofer... he he he Everything else, like making phone calls, sending and receiving texts, etc. seems to work just as they should. One cool feature that I haven't seen on other phones before is a button that allows me to switch between open applications. So for the IM client, especially, I don't have to leave the phone open so I don't close the running application when I close the phone. It just runs in the background, and I can just press a button to cycle through open apps to get back to it.

Overall, for not being a smartphone, I think the LG CU500 pretty much fits all my needs. I still do need a smartphone soon for business purposes, and so I can seem like I'm all important when a million spam hit my e-mail inbox and I have to check every single one, and so I can keep track of all drinking appointments, but this LG CU500 phone is good to use for those times when I don't need to look so professional.