Designed to Annoy. Review on LG M4410

Obnoxious…that’s the only word that can possibly do justice to this pathetic excuse of a music phone. I fancy myself as a prosumer, but it just happened that my Dad straight out of the blue gifted this set to me, maybe because over the years he’s bought a lot of LG goodies from a particular distributor, and the distributor offloaded this junk to him at a very attractive price. So I did not have any choice in it’s acquisition else you wouldn’t had caught me red handed with this atrocity. It is one thing to have a defective set of an otherwise perfectly good model like I did with my old Sony Ericsson K500i (Read Review), but something totally different when the problem is an inherent flaw in the design itself.

So you might ask me what attributes in this set ticks me off. The appropriate question would be what doesn’t. Allow me to first elucidate on some of it’s good points, trust me there aren’t too many.

1. Build and screen Quality : The construction and build quality seems to be pretty decent, As is the case with most clamshells these days it has 2 displays, the main one being at 220 x 176 res, which is rather adequate , but pretty much useless for reasons described later. The external LCD on the hatch is flanked by 3 media buttons meant for controlling the MP3 player. The overall size, much like a slimmer version of a computer mouse however leads a lot to be desired, especially when you consider the features, or rather the lack of it. The darned thing's pretty heavy as well. Great for using as a projectile for self defence. I wonder who was the marketing whiz kid who coined the term “Car styled music phone” for this thing.

   
   




2. Reception and Battery life : The reception clarity is pretty good and even in places where other phones have a problem, conversations on this phone are pretty clear and crisp. Battery life rivals phones from the Nokia stable and is by and large pretty good during the 1st 3 months or so. That was all the time I spent with it.

   
   




3. Keypad and interface : The keypad is a rather large one, and though while comfortable to type on it, the performance is severely limited by the poor software as the rate of input is excruciatingly slow. It is rarerly the case that a system cant cope with standard manual input and this phone has the dubious distinction of being one of them. BTW in most other phones when you’re in the text mode, keeping a key pressed would generate the corresponding number for the key, not in this baby.

   
   




4. Camera : The still camera as decent 1.3 megapixel resolution, and pictures taken in bright places appear crisp. It also has a built in LED light beside the lens, which doubles up as a feeble flash but a bright torchlight.

   
   

Hmmm I think I’ve ran out of praise for this phone, there is nothing delightful and unique about this phone, but do let me have the pleasure of highlighting some, lets make that most of the faulty and at times infuriating features. Let’s open the discrourse with the address book. It has this puny 250 capacity, inspite of being preloaded with 8 mb of internal RAM. If that wasn’t bad enough, you cannot append to existing contacts. For example, once you’ve added, lets say the mobile number of a contact, you cant simply save another number for office or home on the fly. So either you ensure that you got the information correct the 1st time, or you have to delete the original entry and make a new one with the updated information. The Organiser, is archaic and there is no auto sync with the included software or Outlook. Whats most depressing is the fact, that you have to keep the phone switched on if you want to hear the alarm. There's no alarm power-on, and so you cant have an alarm if you're desperate to conserve battery life. The geniuses of the LG phone design dept may have a biological alarm clock, that rivals the one in hibernating polar bears, but I am only a regular mortal

Let move over now to the crown jewels, the MP3 player. You have to listen to it to believe me folks. With the included earbuds, it sounds worse than the cheap personal fm radios they sell on the pavements. Bass is non existent, and so are the midranges. I honestly have felt the sound is monorual , as I have never detected any pan between the left and right. Wait there’s more, the maximum amount of memory that the phone can be upgraded to is a shamefully modest 128Mb.(A 64mb card is included with the phone) I don’t think most vendors will bother with selling 128MB miniSD cards, as 256Mb is kind of standard for flash memory now. But then, I really don’t think that matters much. The phone works on a serial connection over the USB (115 Kb/s max), and the time it takes to download a song is nearly the same as the duration of the song itself. Forget about using the windows file manager to transfer songs or any other data for the matter, the crappy software does not even allow you to make multiple selections, so that you can take a siesta or do something else while the songs are being transferred unattended. Bottomline; it fails at the very thing it was touted to do, to act as a MP3 player. If you think that is appalling listen to this, the phone has a pair of tiny external speakers, which one can use to make others listen to a cheesy audio clip, or a Weird Al Yankovic track, but oddly enough there is no speakerphone function. I don’t know which prized nincompoop designed this phone, either he was perpetually stoned on some outlawed drug or was merely trying to get back at his R&D head by designing this monstrosity.

Now coming back to the camera, which I had extolled a little while back,I forgot to inform my discerning readers about the hallowed “silent movie” function. What it does is exactly what the name suggests, it records and plays back a 20 sec (max time) clip without the days. The designer must’ve been a great Valentino fan. Anyhow after you’ve recorded your masterpiece you really cant share it with others as the phone records them in a proprietary format and not 3GP. There is no voice recording to start off with and so it doesn’t hurt that this thing can’t recognize or play back AMR files as well. Speaking about transfers, though the Bluetooth feature works well with the included headset, but is not too compatible for file transfers with other std Bluetooth phones. I guess the freebie headset would be the only thing that might convince indigent people to buy the phone. I made good use of mine, I’ll tell you later. Coming back to the point, I was able to receive a ringtone from a Nokia but was unable to send anything. And this thing does not take in standard java applications, and describing the games it shipped with would be an insult to our intellect.

So how do you think I live with such junk? well I don’t. I was spoilt by my last phone , a Sony Ericsson K500, and this was like a poor downgrade. I was saddened whenever I saw this phone and wished it could do the things I wanted it to. It was quite an emotional ordeal for someone a bit tech savvy as me. After nearly 3 months of cursing the “thing” (would be a shame to call it a phone) and myself, I decided to redeem myself and traded it for a gleaming Sony Ericsson K750, sans the Bluetooth headset at a loss, yet I’ve never been a happier man. LG is trying to reinvent itself in the GSM mobile space, but judging from the fraudulent M4410, I hope and pray they fail miserably. They ought to stick to what they do best, make cheap CDMA phones for mass market, and leave the business of making multimedia phones to Sony Ericsson and Nokia. This phone in my not-so-humble opinion was just a joke, in bad taste, and taken too far.