Introduction
LG Rumor Touch belongs to a series of Rumor feature phones from Sprint manufactured by LG. The LG Rumor Touch, issued in 2009, differs from its predecessors, LG Rumor and LG Rumor 2. All three devices are horizontal sliders, but the Rumor Touch has a number of improvements and extra features, including a touch screen together with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, a 2-megapixel camera, a completely new interface for sending and receiving messages, GPS, EV-DO Rev.0, more social networking support.
Design
The LG Rumor Touch has a lovely subtle design. It is well constructed in the shape of an uncomplicated rectangular with faintly curved side surfaces and a soft-touch backside panel. It is 4.2 inches long, 2.2 inches wide and 0.6 inch thick. On the whole the size is very comfy and handy and with the weight of 4.7 ounces it does not seem weighty, but feels pleasant and reassuring in hand.
The Rumor Touch features a 3-inch touch screen, which looks rather accurate. The touch screen is plastic resistive, featuring high resistance to dust and water, and in addition it can be used with a finger, a gloved hand, or a mechanical stylus. The touch screen has a 240x400-pixel resolution and supports 262,000 colors, which effects in a well-defined text and images on a lively display. The text size, the brightness, and the backlight time can be altered. The phone features audio and haptic feedback for you to set different vibration styles with diverse levels of intensity, as well as a touch calibration wizard. When the keyboard slider is closed, the LG Rumor Touch works as a touch screen phone. Below the screen there are three physical buttons, namely, Back, Home and Call. The LG Rumor Touch has a volume rocker and a camera button on the left side, while on the right there is a 3.5 mm stereo headset jack, a micro SD card slot and a Power/Lock button. A charger jack is on the bottom side, and the back panel houses 2 MP camera lens and an external speaker.
The Rumor Touch home screen is almost empty. There is just the only shortcut to the Home screen at the bottom and information reflecting the date, time, battery, and signal strength. But as soon as you receive a new text message, on the top right of your screen a small bubble icon appears with a figure indicating the number of the incoming messages. If you select the icon, the screen is filled with particularly nice little elongated bubbles, which present latest activities like new messages and missed calls. So, you can close them or answer your messages.
One more novelty that distinguishes The Rumor Touch from the Rumor series is the Hello User Interface (Hello UI), a pretty fine way to arrange your contact groups. On the left side there are four colored dots (red, blue, green, yellow), each one symbolizing a separate group of contacts. With Hello UI you add your favorite contacts to any of the group. The contact will be embodied on the Hello UI in the form of a cartoon character, which can be altered by any of the 12 included characters or by a picture you will select. So, you can have four groups and you can fill each group with up to six members. If you select one contact, other shortcuts get together to encircle the image. Each of them gives quick access to the contact list, speed dial to a member, shows the way to a new message, the latest text conversation. What is the most curious with the Hello UI is that you can unite all the contacts out of the six ones in a group by drawing a “circle” around them and send to everybody one and the same message.
The Rumor Touch has an onscreen keyboard, which is a basic alphanumeric keypad with 12 keys. You can reach it by pressing the Call key and can use it for texting, but decidedly a sliding-out QWERTY keyboard is more preferable as purposely designed for easy typesetting.
LG Rumor Touch has a 5-rowed QWERTY keyboard in contrast to the Rumor with 3-rowed and the Rumor2 with 4-rowed keyboards. The upper row is a dedicated number row. A logical layout of the QWERTY keyboard with an orange FN button and other important buttons like Enter, Shift, Back, Space and others highlighted in blue, is easy and comfortable for using in practice. The keys are well spaced and give a nice audio feedback when pressing. However, it is easier to type by striking the buttons with your nails rather than with finger tips as they are made of a slightly slippery plastic.
Features
Some of the basic features include a world clock, a calendar, a calculator, a speakerphone, a vibrate function, text messaging as well as multimedia messaging. You may add to these GPS supported by Sprint Navigation, stereo Bluetooth, a document viewer, USB storage device.
The Rumor Touch phonebook is limited to 600 entry contacts. Each contact can store up to seven phone numbers, an e-mail address, a physical address, a birthday, a job title, a company name, a memo, and a Web URL. Besides you are able to fill each entry with a related picture ID (out of photos stored in the phone), a ringtone (stored in the phone), and one of four vibration modes.
The Rumor Touch is a solid phone as regards social networking. The built-in apps for Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, though not very powerful but provide quite good options for keeping up with status updates. If you need your e-mail on the go, the Rumor Touch supports mobile e-mail with Gmail, Windows Live, Yahoo Mail, AOL, Hotmail, including your work e-mail. It is a real pleasure for users that the Rumor Touch supports a threaded messaging format, which makes your SMS more communicative, as all messages from one person are grouped together and you can view both sides of a messaging conversation on a screen.
If you like to watch live TV and on-demand video, or purchase and download music over the air (priced 99 cents per track), the Rumor Touch supports EV-DO Rev.0, which provides access to Sprint’s 3G services. The music player is simple, you can repeat or shuffle your songs, or arrange and edit playlists on the fly. There is no problem to play music in the background, to listen to songs while you surf the Web or check your Facebook friends. The capacity of the internal memory for the Rumor Touch is 52MB plus an additional capacity from 32GB micro SD card.
With the help of HTML browser on the phone you can turn the images on or off, alter the font size, add bookmarks, set Google as your search option.
In comparison to 1.3 megapixel camera of the Rumor and the Rumor 2, the LG Rumor Touch has upgraded the camera to 2 megapixels, but it lacks flash and auto-focus. You can select such options as brightness, white balance, fun frames, color settings, a self-timer, and a 2x digital zoom. The photos can be taken in four resolutions and three quality settings. Though it seems that the images look sharp enough with good saturation and color balance, they may be assessed as rather average. Among such devices like the LG enV 3 and the Samsung Rogue, having 3 megapixel or higher cameras, the Rumor Touch comes off a loser. It is better to have good lighting for taking photos with the Rumor Touch. The device has also a built-in camcorder. The camcorder settings are the same as the still camera has, but it records video in one of three resolutions. It is possible to upload photos and videos to Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube to share with your favorite friends, or you are able to share them through Video Sharing service or Sprint’s Picture.
There is an imbedded GPS in the Rumor Touch. As a result of a new EV-DO support Sprint Navigation has become more effective and speedy if compared with the Rumor 2. Maps are loaded quickly and accurately. The voice assistance is crisp and clear. You can have 2D and 3D maps, POIs searching tools and more, which is a monthly subscription at the price of $9.99.
As for personalization or tailoring the phone to your individual preferences, you are able to change the wallpaper or screensaver, download fresh ringtones.
Performance
The Rumor Touch call quality can be considered as rather excellent, somewhere between very good and excellent. From both sides voices sound natural and clear, with plenty of volume, both outdoors and indoors. It seems that the speakerphone gives a slight echo.
The 3G data transfer speeds in the Rumor Touch is quite ample. Downloading of a 1.6MB song takes about 30 seconds, the mobile ManualsDir’s page is downloaded just in 22 seconds. Music quality is good too, but just for acoustic reliability you should better use stereo headphones.
The LG Rumor Touch has a 1250 mAh rechargeable battery which life is assumed as average, 7 hours talk time. The Good
Loud clear calls
Excellent tailor-made messaging interface
A five-rowed QWERTY keyboard
An easy access to social networking sites
The Bad
Photo quality leaves much to be desired
A short battery life
Lack of Wi-Fi ability
2-megapixel camera
The Bottom Line
The LG Rumor Touch is a new and improved option for a messaging phone with a touch screen and a sliding keyboard. It has a user-friendly interface, which makes a process of text messaging a nice pleasure.
