LG DoublePlay (T-Mobile)

The LG DoublePlay ($99.99 with two-year contract) is an interesting new?smartphone. Like the excellent T-Mobile myTouch 4G Slide?($199.99, 4.5 stars) and the T-Mobile Sidekick 4G ($79.99, 4 stars), the DoublePlay features a full, slide-out QWERTY keyboard. Unlike those phones, however, the keyboard is split down the middle to make room for a secondary, 2-inch touch screen. It's an innovative design choice, but one that ultimately doesn't pay off.

Design, Keyboard, and Call Quality
The DoublePlay measures 4.8 by 2.5 by 0.6 inches (HWD) and weighs a whopping 6.7 ounces; that's heavy, even when taking the keyboard and second display into account. It's made of dark grey plastic with a light grey accent band and feels well-built. The 3.5-inch, 320-by-480 pixel capacitive touch screen is?bright and colorful, though it has a lower resolution than higher-end Android devices.

The slide-out, four-row QWERTY keyboard is an interesting one. It features large, well-separated plastic keys that are easy to press. But the keyboard is split into two distinct halves; QWERT on one side and YUIOP on the other. This is to make room for the second touch screen in the middle; more on that in a moment. While I like the size and feel of the keys, I just couldn't get used to the big gap separating the two sides of the keyboard. Frequent messagers will be better off with the Sidekick 4G or the myTouch 4G Slide.

The keyboard is separated by a 2-inch QVGA touch sub-display. Unlike the dual-screen Kyocera Echo (3 stars), the second screen here doesn't function as an extension of the primary display. Instead, it offers a number of shortcuts you can access, which include Messaging, Group Text, Music, Photo, Browser, Email, Richnote, Social+, and Calendar. The idea is neat, but it isn't particularly useful.

Messaging, for instance, opens a new window on the sub-display on which you can type and send text messages without having to abandon whatever you're doing on your primary screen. The Browser function, meanwhile, allows you to store bookmarks on the sub-display; when you tap on one it'll open the page in the browser on the primary screen. But the small size of the secondary display makes tapping around difficult, and you are limited to only using the few shortcuts LG has made available. There's no way to use apps like Netflix through the secondary display.

The DoublePlay is a quad-band EDGE (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) and dual-band HSPA 14.4 (1700/2100 MHz) device with 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi. It also supports T-Mobile's Wi-Fi calling, which is a nice way to save money on your calling plan or compensate for a weak signal. Call quality is good over both T-Mobile's network and Wi-Fi. Reception is average, and voices sound clear in the phone's earpiece, though slightly robotic. On the other end, calls made with the phone sound very clear and natural, with average noise cancellation. The speakerphone sounds a bit thin, but is just loud enough to use outdoors. Calls also sounded good through a?Jawbone Era?Bluetooth headset ($129, 4 stars), and voice dialing worked fine over Bluetooth without training. Battery life was average, at 5 hours 52 minutes of talk time with the keyboard slid in and the secondary display inactive.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/cwqcFMOPvHw/0,2817,2396055,00.asp

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