Featuring a full QWERTY keyboard beneath its innovative sliding faceplate, the LG F9100 is designed for mobile users who use their phones for more than just talking. The F9100's practical keyboard makes typing a breeze featuring a vibrant, 65K-color display and MMS capabilities, all packaged inside a sleek, stylish handset with a side-sliding form factor... [Continue reading LG F9100 Review]
LG F9100 Features
Large color screen rotates 90 degrees for IM, text messaging, and address book functions (landscape with slide open; portrait with slide closed)
Sliding QWERTY keyboard for fast and easy text messaging
One-touch embedded mobile instant messaging using AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), ICQ, and Yahoo! Messenger
GPRS Class 10 for high-speed data transmission
Java 2.0 support for application and game downloads
Personal organizer with Calendar, Scheduler, Alarm Clock, and Notepad
Tools including World Clock, Calculator, and Ez Tip Calc
Voice Memo Recording for up to 3 messages of 30 seconds each
LG F9100 User Reviews
1. Posted by crywalt
Wed Aug 03, 2005 6:55 pm
Here's a reprint of my Amazon.com review:
I've had my LG F9100 for about a month now and I am getting increasingly annoyed with it and Cingular and LG. All of them together have made this phone an absolutely terrible buy.
When I went looking for a new phone after many years on Verizon, what I wanted was simple: Either a phone that could play MP3s, or a phone with a keyboard. Years ago I had a Sharp Zaurus and I loved typing things in -- ideas, to-do lists, stories, whatever -- but the Zaurus had a lot of limitations. A phone with a keyboard would solve a lot of problems.
As soon as I saw the LG F9100, I was in love. It seemed an elegant and excellent solution: An electronic device which can be a true multitasker and still fit in my pocket! Just what I wanted.
Wrong. My first disappointment was discovering that the keyboard doesn't work with anything other than text messaging over SMS, IM, and putting numbers in the phone book. Using Google over WAP: No keyboard. Using MapQuest: No keyboard. Even using the built-in calendar or memo applications: No keyboard.
Well, okay, I thought. Text messaging is pretty cool, and there's an SMS-SMTP gateway so you can send e-mail from your phone to any address on the Internet.
On a long trip in Atlantic City I decided to use the text messaging to tell my friends about amusing things happening on my trip. They were short messages -- but not short enough. Every message I sent got cut off.
My research on this showed that SMS only supports 160 characters per message. Okay, SMS is for SHORT messages. But -- and here's where I started to get annoyed -- if I send an SMS message to another PHONE and it's over 160 characters, the message gets split up and then reconstituted at the other phone -- SEAMLESSLY -- so I can send long messages, up to slightly less than 1000 characters. So the 160-character limit CAN be worked around. But, for some reason, NOT for SMS-SMTP. Which is pretty stupid, considering that my wife's phone is a crappy little Motorola and the Cingular SMS-SMTP gateway server is probably a big ole Unix box somewhere.
So I called Cingular customer support. It took me over an hour and I never found anyone who could even understand my problem, much less fix it. I finally got an SMS text message -- oh the irony! It was LONGER than 160 characters -- explaining that SMS is limited to 160 and they couldn't do anything about it.
Fine. So maybe I should be using MMS, which is the successor to SMS, to send my messages. MMS doesn't have the 160-character limit.
Too bad the F9100's KEYBOARD doesn't work with MMS.
Fine. Well, the phone also does Java. I'm a programmer. So I figured maybe I could write my own program which would allow the keyboard to be used to send e-mail. Except how to access the keyboard from Java? I sent a message to LG to ask. I received this reply: "Our equipment is not compatible with the applications you mentioned."
So I wrote back again asking what applications their equipment WAS compatible with. I mean, clearly the keyboard CAN work -- it works with the text messaging, and that was programmed using some language or other. I got this back: "Our phones are designed according to the service provider's specification. As such, the functionality of your phone is the mere design result approved and accepted not only by your service provider, but by the FCC. The F9100 was mainly designed for text/SMS messaging usage. Therefore, the keyboard usage is limited to such. In addition, LG is not in a position to provide any more information than what you have been given concerning the internal coding as that is considered proprietary information."
Which I translate as "Any boneheaded design decisions aren't LG's fault, and furthermore we have no intention of fixing any of them, no matter how much it angers our customers, so go stuff an eggplant where the sun don't shine." In fact, a later message from LG made it clear that Cingular is LG's customer, not me. I guess I hallucinated that little LG logo on my phone and the box it came in.
Okay, fine. So I'll just keep my own little messages on the phone, using the keyboard to type in SMS messages which I'll just save and never send out. I can still use it for to-do lists and stuff.
Except for the final flaw: Every so often, the phone eats parts of saved messages. They just turn into gibberish, and if you try to read them, the phone's text messaging application crashes.
And I have yet to get the phone's Yahoo Messenger feature to work.
Way to go! Guess I now know what the F in F9100 stands for.
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