LG Splendor (U.S. Cellular)

The LG Splendor ($79.99 direct) is a sleek touch-screen slab for U.S. Cellular, the nation's 7th largest carrier and its largest regional carrier. The problem is, even though the LG Splendor is a brand new Android?smartphone, there's little reason to buy it, thanks to the existence of several other better phones already in U.S. Cellular's lineup at or near the same price.

Design, Connectivity, and Call Quality
The LG Splendor measures 4.92 by 2.64 by 0.34 inches (HWD) and weighs a svelte 4.2 ounces. It's made entirely of hard black plastic, save for the glass screen. The back panel features a textured vertical line pattern. The 4.3-inch IPS 800-by-480-pixel capacitive touch screen looks bright and crisp, and is covered in Corning Gorilla glass. Strangely, there's no ambient light sensor, so all you get is a software brightness slider. Beneath the screen are two touch buttons and a hardware Home button, which is an unusual configuration for an Android phone, but one that shouldn't pose many problems.

The LG Splendor is a quad-band EV-DO Rev A (850/1700/1900/2100MHz) device with 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi. U.S. Cellular runs its own 3G and 4G LTE networks in portions of 26 states, and won our Readers' Choice award this year for its reasonable prices and reliable network. The Splendor doesn't support 4G LTE, though.

Voice quality isn't great. The main culprit is a muffled tone in the earpiece that makes it tough to hear what the other person is saying in noisy environments, though it's fine if there's not a lot of background noise. Transmissions through the microphone are clear, though, and reception is solid. Calls sounded fine through a Jawbone Era Bluetooth headset. I could trigger voice dialing over Bluetooth, but it never understood me properly, despite repeated attempts. The speakerphone goes pretty loud, but it sounds horribly distorted at the top setting; you'll want to back off a notch or two if possible.?The 1,700mAh battery was good for a solid 7 hours and 35 minutes of talk time.

Hardware, OS, and Apps
There's a single-core 1GHz processor on board, but that's not as bad as it sounds. The LG Splendor runs Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich," so it feels considerably snappier in day-to-day use than Android 2.3 "Gingerbread," which unfortunately is still appearing on new phones like the keyboarded Samsung Galaxy Metrix 4G, also on U.S. Cellular.?ICS is still one version behind the current Android 4.1 "Jelly Bean," though, and there's no word yet on a possible future upgrade.

Otherwise, this is a solid Android phone for running apps. There are five home screens you can swipe between and customize. LG modified the UI slightly, and includes an app drawer you can configure by tapping the gear icon in the upper right corner. You can also make little file folders of apps and drop them on home screens.

LG's Quickmemo app (pictured right) lets you snap screenshots, draw on them with your fingertip, and email them to colleagues or friends. And you shouldn't have any problem running most of the 600,000+ third-party apps available in Google Play, thanks to the Splendor's Android 4.0 OS and standard specs. Benchmark scores weren't bad for a budget Android phone, and indicate you can at least run some 3D games, albeit not at 30 frames per second.

Multimedia, Camera, and Conclusions
There's 2.08GB of free internal storage, plus a microSD card slot under the battery cover, which lacks a fingernail indent and is a pain to remove. LG throws in a 4GB card, and my 32GB SanDisk card worked fine. There's also a standard-size 3.5mm headphone jack along the top edge. Music tracks sound fine through Plantronics BackBeat Go ?Bluetooth earphones, and the phone has no trouble playing any of our audio test files. Standalone DivX, Xvid, MPEG, and H.264 videos play smoothly at sizes up to 720p, but my 1080p videos wouldn't play. Stereo Bluetooth audio was in sync, though.

The 5-megapixel autofocus camera has an LED flash and geotagging. The Splendor includes what is now becoming LG's trademark "Cheese" shutter, which lets you say the word to snap a photo without having to fiddle with the on-screen controls. Shutter and save speeds are quick, and photos look vibrant and detailed outdoors. Indoor shots had muted color but were still sharp. Recorded 720p and VGA videos play smoothly at 29 frames per second and exhibit bright, crisp color both indoors and out, and skew slightly warm in the spectrum. There's no 1080p recording or image stabilization. You do get a weak, front-facing VGA camera for video chats.

LG has its work cut out for it in selling the Splendor. LG's biggest problem on U.S. Cellular is competing against the $99.99 Motorola Electrify 2, which features a dual-core processor, a higher-resolution screen, and a better camera; that's easily worth spending the extra $20 for. There's also the older Samsung Galaxy S II, which also has a dual-core processor, plus a slightly larger 4.5-inch screen and a better camera, all for the same $79.99 as the LG Splendor.?My advice: Keep an eye on the retail pricing of these three phones. If the LG Splendor drops significantly, it'll be a solid buy, but for now the other two are better phones overall.

Finally, our favorite smartphone on U.S. Cellular remains the $199.99 Samsung Galaxy S III, which features a blistering 1.5GHz dual-core CPU, a 720p high-definition 4.8-inch screen, and a significantly better 8-megapixel camera with 1080p video recording and image stabilization.

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