Review: LG Lucid 2 for Verizon Wireless
Menus
The L2 runs Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean and comes with the same LG-developed user interface skin we've seen on LG's smartphones for the last six to eight months.
First, the lock screen. It's fully customizable. It offers four shortcuts, all of which can be changed or deleted. You can also customize which clock appears on the lock screen, and whether or not weather data and other alerts are sent to the lock screen. Good stuff.
There are five home screen panels for customization out of the box, but you can delete or add screens if you wish. There are a multitude of widgets (57) on board. I really like the animations used by LG for screen transitions.
The main menu is a regular old grid of apps. Thankfully, you have some flexibility as far as customizing it is concerned. You can view it with large icons (default) or small icons to fit more apps on each individual page. You can sort apps alphabetically or via install date. You can't, however, view them in list form.
The drop-down notification shade provides access to controls for all of the wireless radios, as well as brightness, rotation, and sound.
The L2 also comes with different home screen themes (each with its own wallpaper and app shortcuts), and of course the ability to tweak ringers, alerts, and so on. You can even customize the app icons with photos you've taken yourself.
As far as performance goes, the L2 uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 1.2GHz processor. You can tell. It is incredibly quick, and gave me no trouble whatsoever when it came to open heavy duty apps.
Calls and Contacts
The L2's phone and contact apps look and behave just as they do on every other Android 4.1 device out there. As far as widgets go, there are the usual home screen widgets for direct contacts, as well as the a nice widget for a collection of your favorites. The bigger widget lets you access your top nine contacts and gives you a cool UI for interacting with them on the home screen. As expected, contact cards hold reams of data, and can be synced with multiple social networks. Verizon also offers its own contact back-up service.
Messaging
As far as messaging goes, the L2 has the stock Android tools on board and nothing else. The stock Android messaging tools, which include Gmail, Google+, SMS, GTalk, and Google+ messenger, are familiar and work well. There's nothing different in that respect. The native Facebook and Twitter apps are not pre-installed, so you'll have to add them yourself.
One thing the SMS app does that's pretty cool is to select from several different themes. The themes are applied to the conversation view, meaning the message composition screen looks the same no matter which theme you choose, but the threaded conversation can be seen in different types of bubbles. See the images below.
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LG Lucid 2
