I recently got my hands on the LG Eve (GW620R), an Android based smartphone with a slide out QWERTY keyboard. While it was hard to do, I put the HTC HD2 down and decided to make the Eve my primary device for a little while. The Eve is not a Nexus One, Desire, or even Hero. But it is a pretty stylish device with plenty of goodness, and considering that this is LG’s first crack at an Android device, it’s also pretty impressive.
For those of you that are not familiar with the Eve, here’s a quick run down of the specs:
- Quad-band phone (850/900/1800/1900 MHz)
- UMTS Dual-band – North American 3G (1900/850 MHz)
- 3.0 inch, 320×480 pixel Resistive screen
- 5 Megapixel Camera
- Powered by Google’s Android 1.5
- FM Radio
- Slide-out QWERTY Keyboard
- Support for microSD expansion cards
- WiFi – 802.11 b/g
- Bluetooth 2.1
- 3.5mm Headphone jack
- Weight – 4.90 oz / 139 g
- Dimensions – 4.29x 2.15 x 0.63 inches / 109 x 54.5 x 15.9 mm
- Accelerometer & GPS
Specs are one thing, performance is another. Overall, in terms of hardware, I’ve been pretty impressed with what the Eve has to offer. The keyboard is responsive and has a great feel to it. Of course, the fifth row of numbers is an excellent plus! It’s a thin device, yet the battery is enough to make it through a day of regular use. A 3.5 inch headphone jack is always nice to see on a smartphone.
The device uses a microUSB connector located under a small plastic flap on the upper left side of the device. I’m not a big fan of these plastic doors as they tend to break after about a years worth of use. I would like to say that the plastic doors that cover the power and MicroSD slot feel good and strong and would last longer than other devices, but I just can’t confirm that.
Also along the left side of the device, you’ll find the volume controls. As one would expect, pressing up will turn the volume up and pressing down will turn the volume down. Radical, I know. Here’s where it gets cool – LG remapped the keys so when you rotate the device and slide out the keyboard – what was down is now on the right side and it will turn up the volume. The left button turns down the volume. At first this feels weird, but when you’re looking at the screen it makes sense. The volume bar moves in the direction of the button you pressed. I found this was a nice touch.
On the top side of the device, dead center, you’ll find a little raised power/lock button that provides quick and easy access to locking the screen of the device when before you toss it into your pocket or purse – whichever the case may be. You can easily press the button with hand and the device will awaken with the “locked” screen. This shows you a quick glimpse of the date, time, battery strength and cellular coverage. Press it again while on the locked screen and the device will unlock. Do nothing, and in 5 seconds the screen will turn off again.
Beside the power button, you’ll find that nice 3.5 inch headphone jack. Positioned on the top right side of the device, you can easily plug in your earphones and it won’t interfere with the regular use of the device. You can still work with the device with the keyboard open, or closed and the cord is out of the way. Sadly, that’s not the case for the power cord.
Down the right side of the device you’ll find the MicroSD slot, hidden behind one of those cheap plastic doors. Below that you’ll find dedicated music and camera buttons. I’m not sure if this is a problem with my review unit, or a sign of some greater problem, but the camera just would not launch for me. I could press the button, or tap the icon in the applications menu as much as I wanted – nothing would come of it. Too bad, because the device sports a 5.0 megapixel camera with an LED flash and it would be nice to see how those images compare to other devices.
As I mentioned before, the keyboard on the LG Eve is really nice. It has just enough travel when you push on a key that you know you’ve pressed that key. The dedicated number row means quick and easy entry of all types of data. I was a little disappointed that press and holding a key did not result in the alternate character being entered. For example, pressing the “2” key and holding it for a couple seconds would result in the “@” symbol being typed. I know there’s a function key in the lower corner, but it’s just quicker to press and hold when you’re hammering through an email or text message.
The slide mechanism on the Eve is softer than expected and it doesn’t “snap” into place like some other smartphones. This wasn’t a big problem or anything. If I have to use a slider, I prefer it to snap into the open and close state. This makes it a little harder to accidentally open in pocket. And with the Eve, it doesn’t have to slide all the way open for the device to unlock and be useable. In fact, you just need to slide it three quarters of the way past the first row of keys and the screen will light up, rotate, and unlock. If this didn’t happen until the device was fully open, then the snap issue wouldn’t have bugged me as much.
On the front of the device, you’ll find a nice screen that shows great color and beautiful images. It’s not a large screen, but it does make good use of the available realestate on the front of the device. The screen on the Eve is a resistive touchscreen, while the navigation buttons on the bottom are capacitive. (If you’re not familiar with the differences between these two screen types, check out my post on this) Coming from a capacitive screen, this took me a little while to get used to using. LG has done a good job on reducing the amount of pressure required while pressing the screen, but I did find it hard at times to navigate accurately.
When it comes to the software powering the LG Eve, you’ll find Android 1.5 under the hood. However, it’s not just basic Android. LG has added their own special touches to make the experience unique.
The first thing you will notice is the 4 icons across the bottom of the screen. LG has locked these icons across all of the home screens. So it doesn’t matter if you slide left or right, you will always have quick and easy access to these main apps. The icons from left to right are: Phone Dialer, Contacts, eMail, and the Start Menu. These application shortcuts are not configurable. So you can’t swap out for your favorite app. Or if you can, I sure wasn’t able to find a way. You can, however, turn this off and I’ll tell you how in just a minute.
The next tweak LG made is to the application menu. When you open the launcher you’ll see that LG has grouped the applications by type – Rogers, Communication, Multimedia, Utilities, Google, and Downloads. You can re-arrange the applications in these categories by doing a tap and hold, then drag to the new category. Anything you install on the device will be added to the Downloads category by default.
The final major user experience tweak done by LG is the looping of the home screens. LG has provided 3 home screens on the Eve – from the main screen you can slide left and slide to the right. The tweak that LG made connects the left screen with the right screen. So you can keep sliding left (or right) and it will just wrap around to the other side.
If these tweaks are not of interest to you, LG has provided a means to disable them. All you need to do is open the lanucher and look for “Homescreen Selector”. When you run this it will prompt you to select the style of homescreen you want to use. You can pick Android Home or LG Home. If you select Android Home, it will disable all of the user experience tweaks that we mentioned here.
When it comes to push Gmail on this device I had some odd experiences. I’ve used push Gmail on a number of Android and Windows Mobile devices and I’ve never had issues until the LG Eve. After configuring the Gmail client on the device I noticed that it did the initial sync but that was the end of it. 8 hours later and it still had not pulled down any new email and a quick check from my desktop clearly showed that there was new unread emails. In order to get it working, I had to go into the settings / Data Synchronization and then toggle sync on all of the items. After that, everything seemed to work fine for a time. It did stop working again a number of days later. Again, I toggled the sync settings and it was back up and working.
I did some searching on this issue and it seems that a number of people are seeing the same behavior. Sadly, the recommended solution seems to be stop using the Gmail client and instead use the Moxier client that is pre-installed on the device. Not the solution I was looking for.
Considering that this is the first Android device from LG, I can’t really complain. They’ve done a great job with the hardware and the software is pretty solid. Aside from the push Gmail issue, I had no problems. At $50 with a contract it’s a very affordable Android device. Without contract it’s selling for $400 which is a little higher than I would want to pay for this device. When you look at the line up of 3G Smartphones that Rogers has, the LG Eve is the best phone in that line up. So it’s worth a look if you’re in the market for an Android 3G smartphone.
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