Folks,

Got around to fitting my car kit for the LG phone into the Landcruiser.  This is
an LG Badged (Made by Qualcomm??)NextG phone, and I'm not terribly impressed
with either the phone OR the car kit at this stage...I've had it for about 4
weeks now, and what little residual glow of joy with Telstra was left is now
well and truly faded...

Sol, Baby, I hope the gerbil of happiness bites your big toe off just AFTER he's
set fire to your cat...

Battery life sucks big time.  Barely a day of life in a new battery on standby,
and that doesnt include making a call! Even my old Nokia 6385 had 4-5 days on
standby, and there were much better than mine around... LG dont supply a car
charger with the phone, but you need to be charging the bloody thing daily. Bit
of a problem if you dont have a car kit and you're away from 240v power...

Back to the car kit.  At least it is cheap. $49 supplied with phone, as opposed
to about $340 for the same from Nokia (if they still made proper car
kits)...Mind you, the idea of having to plug the speaker/mic in separately to
the cradle mount is pretty crap. Also, why would you place the release button
for the cradle in exactly the same spot as the external volume control buttons?
That took some serious thought!

It took me some time to work out the power connections required to get the phone
to work in the car kit. Simply connecting the unit to power isnt enough. The
minimal instructions with the car kit dont mention how to set it up if you dont
want it hard-wired to the battery(I only want it charging when key is in & set
to 'Acc' or 'On'). It requires a power lead running to both the main (+'ve)
input and the ignition sense lead to get some life out of the kit. This is
despite there only being power supplied if the key is on....More fool me..

Next problem is the bloody phone doesnt recognise the car kit, despite it
receiving charge from the kit.  The phone sees a headset when the additional
lead is plugged into the phones speaker/mic socket, but this then excludes 'Car
Kit' as a profile option on the phones' settings.

Next, we have the joy of needing to answer a phone locked in the car kit.  Turns
out that setting the phone to 'Any key answer' doesnt actually mean the keys on
the outside of the phone.  So, you either need to leave your phone flipped open
while in the car kit, or need to flip the phone open each time to answer a call.
This seems to be in part because the headset profile assumes you have a proper
headset, which actually has a button to answer the call.  Unfortunately, the
pseudoconnection with the car kit doesnt have such a button.
Pretty neat, hey??

Then, we have the joy of email on the poxed phone.  It seems there are 2 or
possibly 3 ways of accessing my email on the phone, and 2 of them dont work;
they look to be webmail, but it wont recognise some of the characters I keep
punching in.  Funnily enough, the user name & password is the same as I use on
the 3rd option, and it works (reasonably).  This third option to access email
(which actually seems to be an application running on the phone) isnt in the
main menu, and I sort of found it by accident when I pressed a button on the
outside of the phone.

I would strongly reccommend that people avoid this phone(and Telstra for being
prepared to sell the bloody thing).  I appreciate that there will be people like
myself who needed a phone immediately, and a car kit was a requirement, but this
phone sucks!  NextG coverage doesnt seem to be that much worse than CDMA at this
stage, and it is yet to be fully operational.  Mind you, I dont use any of the
video crap, as I just want a phone for being a phone.

So....My question is whether those of you insane enough to want to adopt NextG
at this early stage have encountered a similar problem(s) with your LG TU500?

 

Cheers,

Rod.....Out Back