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Phone Features and Reception The LG Lotus Elite has great reception and gets full bars in areas with good coverage and more than half of the full strength in areas with just OK coverage. The audio quality is excellent with very clear and loud voice on both incoming and outgoing ends, and it doesn’t have any background white noise. The Lotus Elite has a Contacts database that can store up to 600 entries with each entry capable of storing 7 numbers and full contact info. The phone can also store up to 98 speed dialing numbers and comes with excellent built-in voice dialing and voice command software. You can launch voice command by pressing and holding the Talk button or the Speaker button. The voice command software handles voice dialing, launching applications and checking the phone’s status.
The Lotus Elite supports text messaging, picture and video messaging as well as web-based IM (AIM, Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger). The phone supports popular POP3 email services including AOL, Yahoo!, Gmail And Hotmail; and it works with Exchange for email and contacts. For accessing the web, the Lotus Elite comes with the Access NetFront web browser (v3.5.1). The browser displays full HTML pages with images and columns altered from their standard desktop layout. The web pages are readable with the default font setting but the browser squeezes the page’s width to fit the phone’s 320 pixel-wide display which results in columns that are one or two words wide but incredibly long (requiring lots of scrolling down and patience). Video Review Here's our 7 minute video review of the Lotus Elite:
GPS and Sprint Navigation The LG Lotus Elite has a built-in aGPS that works with Sprint Navigation. The GPS gets signal and position fixes quite fast and Sprint Navigation loads quickly. Sprint Navigation has real time route calculation, re-routing and turn-by-turn directions with voice guidance. The Lotus Elite is generally quick to calculate routes except at the beginning of a real time navigation session. It takes a bit of time to catch up with the current location, but once it’s found you, it can certainly keep up with your driving. The screen looks good for viewing maps and the speakers are loud and clear for voice guidance. Sprint Navigation (powered by TeleNav) comes with a large selection of POIs and offers local searches and location sharing.
Multimedia The LG Lotus Elite is a good music phone thanks to the front facing stereo speakers, the support for Sprint Music Store, the microSD card slot and the built-in music player. The phone’s speakers are loud and ringy; audio quality is clear though not terribly full. The Lotus Elite has touch controls for the music player on the external screen to match the outward firing speakers. The phone works well with the Sprint’s Music Store, and the built-in music player can play MP3, AAC, AAC+ and MP4A files. We tested tunes ripped in the iTunes and they played well on the Lotus Elite. The microSD card slot supports SDHC and we tested high capacity cards which worked fine on the phone. The LG Lotus Elite has a 2.5mm headset jack, but it doesn’t come with a headset in the box. The phone also works with wireless stereo headsets via Bluetooth A2DP. We tested the music playback using the Jabra HALO, and the Lotus Elite had some trouble streaming music via A2DP to the Jabra HALO though it had no problem streaming voice calls. The Lotus Elite supports Sprint TV, a collection of on-demand TV shows, movies and music programs served over Sprint’s data network. The streaming speed is decent on the Lotus Elite, and the video playback has some frame drops but not too laggy as long as you are in an area with decent EV-DO coverage. Sprint TV videos look a little blocky, especially in the full screen mode. The external screen can play Sprint TV content with touch screen controls, which makes a good use of the front speakers. The large keyboard and the landscape screen provide good controls and display for gaming. Most games play smoothly on the Lotus Elite with good audio and excellent controls. Games don’t usually play on the external screen.
Camera The LG Lotus Elite has a 2.0 megapixel camera that lives on the hinge of the flip. The camera faces out with the flip closed and the external screen becomes viewfinder. Like the music player, the camera app has touch controls that works on the external touch screen. The camera lens faces in when the flip is open for taking self-portrait shots. Still images taken with the Lotus Elite are decent by 2 megapixel camera phone standards. They look reasonably sharp and bright on the phone’s 2.4” screen. They are good enough for posting snapshots on the web, but on a big computer screen the photos have a noticeable amount of noise as you would expect from a 2 megapixel camera phone. The camera application offers settings for resolution, quality, white balance, brightness and more; and it has a night shot mode. The Lotus Elite can also capture QVGA video with audio in short length for picture mail or long for storing locally. The QVGA videos look smooth and audio is in sync with video. You can choose from three resolutions, brightness and white balance for the video clips. Battery Life The LG Lotus Elite has a rechargeable Lithium Ion battery that’s 1,000 mAh in capacity. The claimed usage time is nearly 6 hours and the claimed standby time is 16.2 days. In our battery tests, the phone lasted us two days on moderate to heavy usage including making phone calls for 30 minutes, surfing the web for 30 minutes, pairing with several Bluetooth headsets, using Sprint Navigation for driving directions for 1 hour and watching Sprint TV for 1 hour.
Conclusion We are glad to see that LG and Sprint are keeping the Lotus line as these are very capable messaging phones with a unique look. The new LG Lotus Elite serves up more fluid lines in design and an excellent OneClick UI. The external touch screen is an interesting update and has great integrations with most applications. The phone has great reception and in-call audio quality, making it a great voice device as well a texting phone. It offers plenty of multimedia content and strong messaging and social networking functions. It’s not a particularly good web browsing phone as the screen resolution squeezes full HTML page layouts too much, and the phone’s 2 megapixel camera will not impress mobile photographers. Sprint is also offering the LG Lotus Elite at a lower introductory price ($99) than the original LG Lotus ($149) under the same contract terms and rebate policies. If you are looking for a 3G CDMA phone with a full QWERTY and a different look, the LG Lotus Elite is certainly worth some consideration. Pro: More polished look and better build than the original model. Great reception and voice quality. Con: Not a great web surfing experience.
Price: $99.99 with 2-year contract after mail-in rebate. $299.99 without contract. Websites: www.lge.com, www.sprint.com
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