The good: The LG Rumor Touch has a unique text-messaging-friendly interface, plus it has a five-row QWERTY keyboard. It also has EV-DO Rev. 0, GPS, stereo Bluetooth, a 3.5mm headset jack, e-mail, and easy access to social network sites. Call quality is great as well.
The bad: The LG Rumor Touch's keyboard layout could be improved, and the photo quality is average.
The bottom line: The LG Rumor Touch is a touch-screen messaging phone from Sprint with a user interface that makes text messaging a breeze.
Long before messaging phones became a trend, LG has been making feature phones with full QWERTY keyboards. Verizon has its line of Voyager and enV handsets, and Sprint has the LG Rumor and the subsequent LG Rumor 2. Though they made decent messaging phones, the previous Rumor handsets were more for the entry-level consumer due to their basic feature sets.
The LG Rumor Touch changes all that, however; it is the first touch-screen phone to bear the Rumor branding, and it carries a slew of improved features. Not only that, but the Rumor Touch carries a unique user interface that ... Expand full review
Long before messaging phones became a trend, LG has been making feature phones with full QWERTY keyboards. Verizon has its line of Voyager and enV handsets, and Sprint has the LG Rumor and the subsequent LG Rumor 2. Though they made decent messaging phones, the previous Rumor handsets were more for the entry-level consumer due to their basic feature sets.
The LG Rumor Touch changes all that, however; it is the first touch-screen phone to bear the Rumor branding, and it carries a slew of improved features. Not only that, but the Rumor Touch carries a unique user interface that seems tailor made for sending and receiving text messages. Its impressive feature set includes a 2-megapixel camera, a 3.5mm headset jack, GPS, and EV-DO Rev. 0. The Rumor Touch is available now for $79.99 with a new two-year service agreement with Sprint.
Design
When we first saw the LG Rumor Touch at CES 2010, we'll admit we were slightly underwhelmed. The design just reminded us so much of the LG Xenon that we were hard-pressed to be excited about it. Looking at it now however, we see it is actually not too bad. Measuring 4.2 inches long by 2.2 inches wide by 0.6 inch thick, the Rumor Touch has a straightforward rectangular shape with slightly curved sides and a soft touch back cover. At 4.7 ounces, it feels nice and solid in the hand without being too heavy.
The LG Rumor Touch has a 3-inch display.
As the name suggests, the Rumor Touch has a large 3-inch touch screen display on the front. It is capable of showing 262,000 colors and holds a 240 x 400-pixel WQVGA resolution, which results in a vibrant display with crisp text and images. You can adjust the brightness, the backlight time, and the font size. The touch screen is resistive so you can either use a stylus or your fingertips to navigate. It doesn't feel as smooth as a capacitive display, but it's not any slower than other resistive screens we've tried. You can add haptic feedback if you want the phone to vibrate whenever you select something and there's a touch calibration wizard if you want better touch precision. Underneath the display are three physical controls--the back key, the home screen key, and the Call key.
The user interface on the Rumor Touch is unlike most other touch screen phones we've tried. The welcome screen area is quite blank, except for the date, time, battery, and signal strength information on the top bar and a single shortcut to the home screen on the bottom. However, whenever you get new incoming text messages, you will see a small bubble icon on the upper right with a number that indicates how many you received. When you select that icon, all your new messages will appear as floating bubbles, filling up the normally empty welcome screen. From there you can either close them out or start replying to your messages. We thought this bubble interface idea is quite a clever one, especially if you're a big messaging fanatic.
When you select the home screen, you will find a simple list view of frequently used applications. You can easily customize this by adding and removing shortcuts. The main menu is presented in exactly the same boring list layout--we would've preferred some kind of variety here to differentiate the two zones. Still, at least it was easy enough to navigate to the features we wanted.
Another specialty that sets the Rumor Touch apart from other phones is the Hello UI, or Hello User Interface. It's accessible via the Contacts list and is essentially a smart way of grouping up your contacts. There are four colored dots on the left hand side, and each corresponds to a different group. To add a contact to a group, simply select the add symbol and choose a contact from your address book. The contact will then be represented on the Hello UI as a cartoon character--you can change this to one of 12 included characters or you can select your own picture to represent him or her.
You can add up to six contacts per group. From there you can drag and drop the icons around or you can snap them to a grid if you like. When you select an individual contact, a circle of shortcuts will appear around the image. They lead to a new text message, the most recent text conversation with him or her, a speed dial to that person, plus quick access to the contacts list. Perhaps the coolest thing you can do with the Hello UI is that you can draw a "lasso" around all the contacts in a particular group to send all of them a group text message.
To get to the number dial pad, you have to press the Call key. The virtual dial pad has large numbers so you can easily dial without messing up. There are also shortcuts to a new text message, the recent calls list, the phone book, and the aforementioned Hello UI. As for sending a text message, you can do so via the touch screen with either handwriting recognition or a T9 keypad. There's no virtual QWERTY keyboard, but that doesn't bother us because the Rumor Touch has a full physical keyboard.
The LG Rumor Touch has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard.
The keyboard slides sideways to the right of the phone, which will then prompt the display to change from portrait to landscape mode. If you are doing this from standby, you'll be presented with the messaging menu the second you slide out the keyboard so you can get started on typing out texts straightaway. The keyboard is quite spacious--it is a five-row keyboard, which gives it one row just for numbers. The keys are raised above the surface in a smooth bubble shape so it's easy to text by feeling your way around. However, the Back, Enter, and arrow keys take up just a tad too much space on the right, which throws off our natural thumb typing position. It therefore takes a little slower to type out texts than we would like.
On the left spine of the Rumor Touch are the volume rocker and camera key, and the 3.5mm headset jack, the Power/Screen lock key, and the microSD card slot are on the right. The charger jack is on the bottom and the camera lens sits on the back next to the external speaker.
Hide Review Next pageFeatures
The LG Rumor Touch has a 600-entry address book and you can add up to seven phone numbers per entry. You can also add an e-mail address, an instant messenger handle, a web URL, a street address, a birthday, a memo, a job title, and a company name. You can also customize each entry with a photo for caller ID, one of 33 polyphonic ringtones, or one of four vibration types. Other basic features include a vibrate mode, a speakerphone, text and multimedia messaging, a world clock, a calendar, a calculator, and a notepad. For the slightly more advanced, the phone also has stereo Bluetooth, GPS with Sprint Navigation support, USB mass storage mode, voice command, wireless backup, and a document viewer.
Since messaging takes center stage on the Rumor Touch, we like that the phone supports threaded text messaging so you can easily view a back and forth conversation. Aside from that, you also get mobile e-mail, which supports AOL, Gmail, Windows Live, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, as well as your own personal and work e-mail. You also get quick access to social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace via dedicated apps.
The Rumor Touch comes with EV-DO Rev. 0, which also gives it access to Sprint's 3G services like Sprint TV, which lets you watch live TV and on-demand video, and the Sprint Music Store, which lets you purchase and download songs over-the-air for only 99 cents per track. The music player has a rather simple interface--you can set songs on repeat or shuffle, and you can create and edit playlists on the fly. The Rumor Touch has 52MB of internal memory but it has a 32GB microSD card capacity for additional storage.
There's also a HTML browser on here, which makes full use of the nice 3-inch display. It's not a super advanced browser--there's no tabbed browsing and you can't access your browser history--but you can change the font size, add bookmarks, turn the images on or off, and you can set Google as your default search option.
The LG Rumor Touch has a 2-megapixel camera on the back.
The 2.0-megapixel camera can take pictures in four resolutions and three quality settings. Other settings include brightness, white balance, color tone, fun frames, a self-timer, and up to 2x digital zoom when not at the largest resolution. Photo quality was average--though the images seemed sharp enough, they often looked overcast with a slight orange tinge when in low light. There's also a built-in camcorder--it can record videos in shorter video mail lengths or longer for-storage lengths, and in one of three resolutions. Other camcorder settings are similar to the still camera.
The LG Rumor Touch takes mediocre photos.
After taking your photos and videos, you can choose to share them via Sprint's Picture and Video Sharing service. You can share them with multiple friends and family members, and you can upload them to Photobucket, Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube.
As for personalizing the phone, you can change out the wallpaper or screensaver on the welcome screen and you can download new ringtones--or record your own if you feel like it. The phone comes with a few games and apps: NFL Mobile Live, NASCAR Sprint Cup Mobile, and demo versions of Family Feud, Midnight Bowling 2, and The Sims 3.
Performance
We tested the LG Rumor Touch in San Francisco using Sprint's service. Call quality was quite impressive on the whole. On our end, we could hear our callers crystal clear without any harsh voice tones or crackly static. It was the same when we were outdoors or indoors.
Callers reported similarly great call quality. They said there was plenty of volume and we sounded really smooth and natural, almost that of landline quality. However, they said that our voice sounded a little muffled when in speakerphone mode. For us, they sounded just fine on the speakerphone--a little echoed, perhaps, but that's normal.
We found the 3G speeds to be quite adequate. We downloaded a 1.6MB song in around 30 seconds and loaded the mobile CNET page in just 22 seconds. Sprint's live TV service looked surprisingly good--action sequences did not suffer from a lot of pixilation. Music quality was OK--we would recommend using a pair of stereo headphones for better audio fidelity.
The LG Rumor Touch has a rated battery life of 7 hours talk time. It has a tested talk time of 6 hours and 51 minutes. According to the FCC, it has a digital SAR of 1.2 watts per kilogram.
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