Review: LG GS505 Sentio
The Sentio supports POP3 email, IM, SMS and social networking all in a limited way. Starting with SMS, at least the Sentio has the good sense to include threaded text conversations. It's not the prettiest implementation ever, but LG's threaded SMS beats the pants off industry vets such as Nokia at making the interface usable. New messages appear in text bubbles and can be scanned quickly to follow conversations from beginning to end. Picture messages are included in this threaded messaging, too.
The Sentio defaults to a 12-key layout with T9 when held in the portrait orientation, but will offer a software QWERTY when rotated onto its side. The software QWERTY is not the best I've used, but it is not the worst. Probably the one strength of resistive touch displays is that it forces you to be accurate when you type on them. The reason I mention this here is because both keyboards consume nearly the entire display, leaving only a slim space for the text to actually appear. It gets frustrating. I mean, SMS messages are only 160 characters. It would be nice to be able to see all of them at once. Forget about long emails. You can see two lines at best, and scrolling up and down through your typed message is a horror.
On the email side, the Sentio has clients for Gmail, AIM Mail, Yahoo, Hotmail and the usual suspects. Enter a username and password, and you're good to go. The email client isn't terrible, but the settings are a bit annoying to deal with, as they are accessible only after clawing through layer after layer of menus. The worst part is that I could only get it to sync 10 messages at a time. Got 30 new emails? Good luck. You're only going to see 10. That makes the email experience rather worthless.
The Sentio also supports the standard three IM networks, namely AIM, Windows Live and Yahoo. The clients are all the same, and were frustrating to use due to the maze of menus you have to activate to get signed in and messaging away.
Last, the Sentio has a mediocre social networking app on board called Social Buzz. It provides rudimentary access to Facebook and Twitter, but only status updates. You can see everything your friends are saying, and even fire off updates yourself, but advanced features such as DMs and commenting on others' Facebook posts are a no-go. At least you can see @replies in Twitter.
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LG Sentio GS505
