My Life with the Touchpoint 1100
Written: May 10 '01
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Pros: small, lightweight, outer LCD display is awesome
Cons: single-band, questionable build quality
The Bottom Line: I'd recommend this phone to anybody who wants a small phone at an affordable price. It's not perfect, but it's not very expensive, either.
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| kdragon's Full Review: LG SP510/TP1100 Cell Phone |
I've owned this phone for about 6 months now and have some mixed feelings about it. I'll go over some of the things I like and then tell you what bothers me about the phone. This is by no means a comprehensive review of all the features since you can just go and read the manufacturer's specs to get that information.
Functionally, it's a great phone. It sounds great, battery life is good (approximately 2.5 hours talk time or 135 hours standby), it's small, the second display on the outside is awesome, receptions is decent, and the main LCD display is large and very readable. I only have to charge the phone once every few days and it fits in any pocket comfortably. I bought the holster as an accessory but find that I almost never use it because it's so easy to slip the phone into a pocket.
My main gripe with clamshell phones before had been the inability to see the caller id information if I had the phone set up to auto answer a call when it was opened. The second LCD on the outside of this phone displays signal strength, battery status, time, date, ring mode, and caller id information. It's really an awesome feature and I'm not surprised that many other manufacturers are copying the idea.
On the software side, it has a couple simple built-in games, a very usable calculator, a calendar, T9 text entry, and wireless web connectivity. I find that I never play the games, occasionally use the calculator, and use the calendar often enough that I wouldn't want a phone without this feature. The T9 text entry system seems to only function when entering information into the calendar and works like a charm. It would be great if it were active in the web browser, but so far I haven't been able to observe this. The main screen is large enough to make looking up simple information like stock quotes or reading short e-mails painless, but doing anything through the browser which requires inputting any amount of data is just not worth the effort in my opinion.
Now I'll tell you what annoys me about this phone. My previous phone came with a travel charger and a base stand. The travel charger plugged into the base stand so that when you were at home you could have the convenience of a charging stand but when you were on the road you could leave the stand at home and just take the cord. The charger which came with this phone requires the base and Sprint doesn't sell a travel charger. Now everywhere I travel the whole setup has to go, too.
About a month into owning the phone, dust started to creep into the outer LCD display. It's gotten bad enough now that under certain glare conditions I can't read the right portion of my display. This hasn't happened to my friend's phone which was purchased at the same time, though, so maybe it's just my phone.
Another thing I dislike is that when scrolling though the phone book listings, the entries are not listed alphabetically like my last Touchpoint did. Instead, they are listed according to their entry slots. Also, when looking up an entry by entering the characters in a name this phone will return all entries which contain that string not just those entries which start with that string. For examples, if I wanted to find my friend Paul I would start by entering a 'P'. My last phone would bring 'Paul' up as on of the first options because it started with 'P'. This phone will instead bring up all entries which contain the letter 'P', sorted by their entry slot. I think this is a change many phones are now making, but, being used to the old method, I found this a little cumbersome. I'm not sure why these changes were made from the previous Touchpoint phones, but they're a couple things which annoy me.
For a phone of it's size, it packs a lot of features and it's survived a recent drop onto asphalt with just a couple scratches on the case. Overall I think that the good things about this phone out weigh the short comings. If you are looking for a phone which is small and affordable this is probably the best option.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 149
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Epinions.com ID:
kdragon
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Member: Jason Suh
Reviews written: 24
Trusted by: 6 members
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