LG Remarq – Slick messaging phone

For:

Compact phone, ergonomic design, great and comfortable QWERTY keyboard, lots of eco friendly materials, has carbon footprint calculator

Against:

Bad photo quality

The Whiz Kid Speaks:

LG Remarq is based on CDMA 850/1900 mode. It weighs 3.8 oz, the dimensions of the phone are 3.5”x2.5”x0.6”. It has a slider form factor. The 990 mAh battery has a rated life of 5.5 hours. The phone’s display is 2.4 inch big (diagonally) and has resolution of 320×240 pixels. It supports 262,144 or 18 bit colors. The handset has 22 MB of internal memory and the phone book entries are limited to 600.

Razzle Dazzle:

LG Remarq has a squat and short design. In terms of looks, it is similar to Verizon Wireless Blitz and Samsung Reclaim. You might not like this layout but we think it will go fine with the youth. The handset is 2.5 inches wide, 0.6 inch thick and it features curved sides and rounded corners. The phone is extremely compact. The device has hard glossy plastic around it and the weight is about 3.8 ounces. In spite of the recycled ingredients, the phone feels sturdy and solid in the hand.

Inside Dope:

LG Remarq is following the footprints of many cell phone manufacturers who are going green. We first got to see this cell phone at CTIA 2010. It is a messaging phone having a sliding layout and is made up of 19 percent plastic. Apart from that, 87% of its part can be recycled if you want to get rid of it. The manufacturer also says that this handset has low levels of polyvinyl chloride and the brominated flame retardants. The cardboard packaging of this phone is made of recycled material as well. Even the charger of the phone is energy efficient (it comes with Energy Star certification) and people who are sympathetic to mother Earth will drool at all these offerings. The eco friendly features aside, this message centric phone is quite impressive. There is no high-speed EV-DO but you get a 1.3 megapixel camera, microSD card, music player, and speaker phone. There is also quick access to the social networking sites like MySpace, Twitter and Facebook. The phone has a square design and its QWERTY keyboard is great too. This phone is availabile in the market for free after $50 mail in rebate. You have to sign a two year contract with Sprint, the service provider.

Display

LG Remarq has a 2.2 inch screen with resolution of 220×176 pixels. It supports 262,000 colors, the text and images look colorful and crisp. You can change the clock appearance, backlight time, brightness, greeting text, calendar, font size, and screen saver. There is support for animated wallpaper too.

Navigation array and keyboard

Beneath the display, there is the navigation array. It is made up of 2 soft buttons, four way square toggle with OK button in the middle, dedicated key for speakerphone, back button, talk and End/Power key. The four keys on the toggle button relate to four shortcuts – My Photos album, My Stuff folder, browser and message inbox.

Slide up the display and you will find a four row full QWERTY keyboard. The keyboard is pretty roomy considering the small form factor of this phone. There is plenty of space between the keys and we didn’t have much mishits while typing.

Phone book and PIM features

The phone book of the LG Remarq is limited to 600 entries and a single entry takes six phone numbers, three e-mail Ids, memo, Web URL, IM handle, street address, job title, birthday and company name. Photo caller ID is also supported and you can make groups of your callers.

Music player

LG Remarq’s music player is typical of Sprint. The songs can be organized by genres, albums and artists. You can also edit and create playlists on the move. Usual controls of the player are all there along with standard shuffle and repeat modes. The music player can be minimized for using other phone features. EV-DO is not here so music cannot be downloaded from Sprint’s store. For storing music, there is 22 MB internal memory and the external card slot can take up to 16 GB cards.

Camera

LG Remarq’s 1.3 megapixel camera takes photos in three resolution and there are three settings for quality. Other offerings include four tones for color, five presets for white balance along with manual option, brightness, 9 fun frames, zoom (this cannot be used in the highest resolution) and self timer. Photo quality is really bad but this is not unexpected from such a low end resolution camera. The pictures looked washed out and blurry, even when the light conditions were good. You cannot use this camera to record videos.
Call quality

LG Remarq has a good call quality but it is not spectacular. We could hear our friends quite well but there was occasional static blip. Voices too were natural. On the other side, our friends had something to complain about. They could hear us quite well but a background hum irritated them a lot. This hum was louder in the speaker phone mode. This is not a deal breaker though and you can talk easily.

Verdict:

This is very affordable messaging phone. Apart from the low resolution camera, we didn’t have any major gripes and hence we will certainly recommend you this device if you don’t click a lot.