Review: LG dLite
The LG dLite has a simple assortment of messaging options. These should be enough for keeping in touch, but there were some problems that could be annoying. The phone has text messaging and MMS messaging. There's also a simple IM chat client, an e-mail app and even a Social Buzz app for social networking support. For text messaging, the app is very basic. To enter a recipient, the phone searches the contact list by default. If you want to add a new number, you have to dig through menus to find the "New Number" option. Since the contact search feature is so basic, I wonder why these methods couldn't be integrated into a single field, like they are on most new smartphones. Type a number and search, each from the same spot.
The IM client supports AIM, Windows Live and Yahoo Messenger. It worked fine in my tests, with little lag between messages. The e-mail client supports AOL, Gmail and Hotmail with preset options, or it can try to figure out settings when you enter your own e-mail address. With my Gmail account, it was able to create different folders based on my Gmail labels.
For social networking fans, the phone comes with a Social Buzz app. This is a rudimentary app for checking status updates on Twitter, MySpace and Facebook. There's nothing else to it, it's only for reading updates and posting your own status message. It's heavily reminiscent of the AT&T Social Net app that AT&T is bundling on its feature phones.
The phone does a terrible job handling messaging alerts. Text message alerts work just fine, but for e-mail and Social Buzz, the alerts are a mess. For e-mail, alerts would come very late after a message arrived, sometimes hours later. In both e-mail and Social Buzz, opening the alert message did not take me directly to my new messages. On e-mail it took me to the e-mail account, so I could at least open the inbox and figure out what was new. Of course, it doesn't help that the first option under e-mail is "New E-mail," which does not show your unread messages, but rather helps you create a new outgoing e-mail.
Alerts for new messages in Social Buzz seem to lead nowhere at all. Clicking an alert opens the Social Buzz app, but there was never an obvious new message to find. The app seems to alert the user whenever there is a new Twitter message. Not a new @reply or a new direct messsage, any new message at all. The app also might have alerted me to new Facebook messages, but I'm not sure. An indicator would appear next to the tiny Facebook icon, but the Social Buzz app was never able to open my Facebook inbox. I would select the Facebook tab and the indicator would disappear, though no new messages would pop up; the phone simply tried and tried to load my inbox but could not succeed.
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LG dLite
