This is the fourth cell phone I have had over the years. I've previously had Samsung, Nokia, and NEC. LOOK The phone is really nice. It's a dark grey color. Both screens are in color and everything is easy to read. It has large buttons that are easy to push, too. RECEPTION/SERVICE I recently spent the weekend traveling all over Ohio and I had great service everywhere. The phone connected every call quickly and never dropped a call. I receive every call and text message that is sent my way. Every caller is very clear and easy to hear. The reception is fantastic. VOLUME Every phone I have ever had or ever talked on, I always wished I could turn it up louder. The ringers were always too low even on max and the callers always seemed too quiet. On this phone, I have to turn the volume down to medium. If I turn it all the way up, I can still hear the caller loud and clear, I just need to hold the phone a foot away from my ear in order to avoid breaking it . So I love the fact that the volume is loud. The ringtones are also super loud. I can hear it ringing in my bedroom when I'm in the basement or in my car when I've got the music blasting. PHONEBOOK New numbers are very easy to add. You can go to your contact list and add a new contact that way. You can type the number in like your going to dial it and save it that way. Or you can go to your call list (dialed, received, or missed) and save a number from there. You then type in the name, and you can save up to 5 numbers per entry. You can set a speed dial, a group, a ringtone, a picture, and a text messaging alert for each contact. You can type in a letter or a part of the name to access someone quickly. It takes just one click to get into your list of contacts. TEXT MESSAGING By default, it is set to Abc (I hate it, but every phone is). You can change it to Word (T9 predictive text), ABC, 123, or Symbols. Sending a new text and responding to a text is very simple and easy to use. You can also easily send pictures (and you can add sound to the pictures) or you can send a video clip. All are very easy to do. You can also send each text message to up to 10 different contacts. Quite nice if you want to send out a bulk message!! CAMERA It has a nice 1.3 megapixel camera. The pictures look pretty good for coming from a phone. You can change the shutter sound to: silent, normal shutter sound, ready 123, or say cheese! It has a self-timer and a flash. You can turn the flash on or off and it will remember your setting, you won't have to turn the flash on every time you want to use it. You can the option to save or erase any picture you take. The button to access the camera is on the right side of the phone. Press once for camera and twice for video. You can also adjust the white balance and the brightness as well as the resolution and color mode (color, sepia, b&w, negative, solari, vivid. There is also a night mode which you can set to on or off. And you can decide if you want the front screen to also act as a camera. Nice for taking self portraits! And its really easy to save, send, and erase every picture. When you go to view you pictures, they show up as tiny thumbnails so you don't have to deal with filenames and such, you can just see the picture. But you can rename them if you wish. MUSIC Yes, this phone can play MP3's. Verizon will tell you that you can only play Window's Media Player files because they like to try to scam you for money. Just go to menu, hit 0, enter all 0's for the service code, and scroll down to 11. Music Setting. In there, select MP3 Enable. Viola! I got the Music Essentials kit which comes with a USB cable to hook your phone to your computer, the software you need, and headphones to use with your phone (regular ones won't work). You can then upload MP3's onto your phone. It has a forward, backward, and play/pause button on the front. I haven't tried to use the MP3's as ringtones yet but that would be a very nice option. RINGTONES They suck . But if you don't care about ringtones, then no big deal. I really hope that you can put your MP3's on your phone and use them as ringtones. Or there are website out there that let you make your own ringtones from your own MP3's. I was too lazy and just paid the $2 a song for the stupid Verizon ones. But the three that I got all sound great! CUSTOMIZATION You can set the clock to multiple different ways. I set mine to digital because its really big and easy to read. The wallpapers aren't too bad either. I found one with bubbles getting big and little floating around and its pretty cool. You can also customize the menu. Mine is called "Pulse" and I love it. It looks really really neat. You can also change the color scheme. So.. you can change the front wallpaper, main wallpaper, front clock, main clock, display themes, front banner, main banner, and big font/normal font. You can also change the power on/off sounds, alert sounds, and keypad volume. You can also have a different ringtone for caller ID, no caller ID, restricted calls, and all calls. Needless to say, you can basically customize the phone to look however you want. BATTERY LIFE I use my cell phone as an alarm, so I have it next to my bed everynight. So I just plug it in while I'm sleeping. I've never tried to let it go multiple days. But it has a full battery at night unless I spent the day taking tons of pictures/videos. I also have a car charger which is quite nice. OTHER FEATURES It has three separate alarm clocks, that you can set to go off just one time, to go off daily, to go off Mon-Fri, or just on the weekends. And you can set it to any ringtone. It has a calendar with reminders, a world clock, voice commands, a notepad, a calculator, an EZ Tip Calculator, security (password protected), customizeable shortcuts, and more! CALLS While on the phone, you can access basically everything on your phone. You can access your contact list and the menu. So I suppose you could send a text message while on the phone if you really wanted to! You can also record while on the phone and listen to it later. Or possibly send it as an attachment to a pix message. SPEAKERPHONE It is loud and easy to hear. I'll drive with the phone on my lap while chatting on speakerphone and I can hear the caller great and the caller can hear me great. It's a nice feature and there is a button on the phone to turn it on and off. An icon shows up on the bottom of both screens when speakerphone is on so you won't accidently have speakerphone on and not know it. I basically spent countless hours researching every single phone Verizon had to offer. So many phones had so many complaints and this one seemed to have the least amount of them. We bought 4 of them, one of each person in our family, and I got my boyfriend one too. All 5 of us love the phones. The buttons are big and easy to push, the phone is very attractive, the reception is fantastic, the volume is very loud, and the phone is very simple to navigate while having a lot of cool features, including a nice 1.3 megapixel camera!! The removeable memory is also a nice feature, as well as buttons for the camera, volume up/down, and the voice commands!! Don't waste time browsing other phones or trying out a cheapie -- they are no good, I've been there. Even my boyfriend (who is 24) and swore he'd never get a cell phone cuz he hated them loves it.
I was wondering when you plug the phone in to charge does the screen light stay on or does it turn off??? Excellent review by the way.
Also I was wondering if the phone is pretty much dead how long does it usually take for the battery to charge. I only ask these questions because I know I would want some answered.
I have this phone as well. When the phone is charging, the screen will go blank...just as it does when it is not charging. When I charge my phone, it normally takes between 60 & 90 minutes. Then I am good for several more days. It seems to have a pretty good battery life. Hope this helps.
Yes I agree... the screens work the same whether it is charging or not. And the phones charge really quick. It fully charged in two hours when I first got the phone -- and thats from zero battery! A downfall that I realized is that there is no way to tell if you have a missed call, a voicemail, or a new text message just by looking at the phone -- you have to look at the screen. My other phones had a light that flashed one color when I had missed something and another color when it was charging. I haven't found any way to tell either one without looking at the screen.
Actually, the Samsung a670 was the same way, so this feature on the 8300 is nothing different for me for texts/voicemails. The a670 did have a colored light for charging however....but if this is the worst of the features, then so be it.
So I was thinking... when my alarm goes off i hit a button on the front and it shuts up and goes off in 5 minutes (my old phone didn't have a snooze button so this is great), but I prefer snooze to be 10 minutes. Anyone know how to change this, or if it is even possible? Also, I found out how to default T9 (Word) text, or any other text you want :-D That totally made my day. Thirdly, does anyone find that blue bar that appears on the bottom of both screens when you have the alarm on, or silent mode on, or a missed call or something? its not a big deal with missed calls/voicemails/etc, but I hate the blue bar but always need an alarm so I can't ever make it go away!
I don't believe the icon bar can be hidden, or the snooze time can be changed. __________________________ See this website for many more tips, tricks, hacks, and mods for the LG VX8300. It has information on Bluetooth, music playing, video recording, BitPim, and more.
I know I have asked this once here before but how is the voice quality of the speakerphone to the person on the other end on the LG VX8300? The couple VX8100 speakerphones I heard while talking to the other party the sound quality was choppy and with lots of background noise on my end. The Motorola E815's speakerphone sounded great however.
I've used my speakerphone a couple of times and found the quality to be quite clear. I don't like speakerphones in general, but this one was very usable and clear.
I've liked mine a lot too. I'll be driving and put someone on speakerphone and put them on my lap while I'm driving. They've always been able to hear me and I could always hear them. My boyfriend works on old hotrods a lot, so he has me on speakerphone majority of the time. He's never had a problem hearing me and I can always here him. So far it has always been very loud & clear!
