The LG 8100

The LG 8100 is multi-media phone that supports a 1.3 megapixel camera, an MP3 player, streaming audio and video, and it has a price tag to match. However, as you'll read in this review, it fails in far too many core aspects to worth what they're charging for it. The worst aspect of the sound is that it seems to go up and down in volume (quite noticeably) for no particular reason. I thought the phone I’d tested was a lemon, but I checked around on the Internet and I found message after message from people complaining of exactly the same thing. Typically the volume can drop so low that you’ll barely be able to heard your caller. It might spring back to normal on its own, but you typically have to end the call and start another one.



On the other hand, outgoing sound quality is actually quite good. In fact, this is one of the better CDMA phones for outgoing audio. It copes exceptionally well with loud background noises, such as an opened window while driving down the highway. Oddly it seems that each time I find a CDMA phone on which the outgoing audio is great, the incoming is horrible. I guess the LG 8100 didn’t want to buck the trend.
The speakers on the LG 8100 are quite good. They’re mounted at either end of the hinge and they produce relatively good reasonably good sound reproduction.



Unfortunately they aren’t very loud in speakerphone mode, and so the feature is really only useable in a very quiet environment. A weird aspect of the speakerphone feature is that in order to switch between normal mode and speakerphone mode you must press AND HOLD the speaker button for about a second. This is annoying and not very intuitive. Another weird thing is that the phone doesn’t switch back to normal mode after a call, and so if you were using speakerphone on your last call, you’ll be using on your next call, whether you expect it or not. This is also annoying.
The quality of this 1.3 megapixel camera is definitely sub-par. Shots are generally dark and there is a lot of noise in those dark areas (even in well-lit shots). Attempting to correct the darkness of a shot using software such as Photoshop simply brings up the noise and the pictures look awful. Compared to the Nokia E50 and Motorola i580 that I had along with me for comparison, the pictures from the LG 8100 were rather disappointing.



MP3 Player and Streaming Music: Luckily I got to try out an LG 8100 that was hooked up with a Spark plan that included the XM satellite radio feature. It works exceptionally well on the 8100 and the audio quality is at least as good as you get from a dedicated XM receiver. The MP3 player software was fine, though certainly not among the best out there, and well behind a typical iPod.