LG Shine II (AT&T)

The LG Shine II doesn't mess with success. The first LG Shine was a best-seller on AT&T thanks to its high-end metallic body and solid call quality. Aside from a few minor improvements, the Shine II is virtually the same as the first model, with the same main benefit—it looks and feels good. It's a good choice for AT&T subscribers looking for a basic, reliable, and classy voice phone.

Design and Call Quality
The Shine II measures 4.2 by 2.0 by 0.5 inches and weighs 4.4 ounces. The Shine's brushed-aluminum housing makes it heavy but durable. Just like my old RAZR V3, I'd expect the Shine II to hold up nicely over time. It also looks great, and the cool blue backlighting enhanced the look further. The slider mechanism felt smooth and satisfying.

The 2.2-inch LCD has 240-by-320-pixel resolution. A new five-way control pad features a prominent, raised center button. The button, left, and right keys were fine, but the up and down keys were very small and stiff. Large-enough Send, End, and Back keys sit above an otherwise cramped, recessed keypad. Dialing numbers was tough with one hand.

As a quad-band EDGE (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) and dual-band HSDPA (850/1900 MHz) phone, the Shine II works on AT&T's 3G network and on 2G EDGE networks overseas. Voice calls sounded loud, clear, and crisp, with a slightly trebly tone in the earpiece. Callers on the other end couldn't distinguish between the Shine II and a BlackBerry Bold 9700 (also on AT&T); both sounded excellent. Calls sounded fine through a Plantronics Voyager Pro Bluetooth headset. The speakerphone went pretty loud, but sounded harsh and distorted at top volume. Battery life was on the short side, at 3 hours and 46 minutes of talk time.

User Interface, Apps, and Multimedia
The Shine II's UI looks sharp and is well designed. The Shine II was very responsive to key presses. The stiff control pad wasn't ideal for gaming, and the Shine II's sluggish Java benchmark results mean you should stick to 2D titles. The Opera-powered Web browser was surprisingly good, offering mobile and landscape views. The browser delivers accurate renderings of desktop HTML pages, but the tiny screen is an impediment.

The Shine hooks into AT&T Mobile e-mail for Yahoo, Windows Live, and AOL accounts, but not Gmail. A basic IM client offers AIM, Yahoo, and Windows Live support but not Google Talk. Either way, with only a numeric keypad, this isn't a messaging phone. (If you want a keyboard, the excellent Pantech Impact beckons, and even costs $20 less.) It also works with AT&T Navigator (powered by TeleNav) for voice-enabled, turn-by-turn GPS directions.

The Shine II's music player includes an adjustable EQ, ringtone creator, and music recognition software. There's 102MB of free onboard storage. A microSD card slot sits underneath the battery cover, but not under the battery; my 16GB SanDisk card worked fine. The proprietary headphone jack is a disappointment, and there are no wired earbuds in the box. Thankfully, the Shine II now supports stereo Bluetooth. Music tracks sounded very bassy over Motorola S9-HDs, even with the Shine II's custom EQ off; LG seems to have hardwired in a bass boost. Tiny album art thumbnails displayed when available. Standalone 3GP and MP4 videos played very smoothly in landscape mode, though the video player was sluggish and clumsy to operate. Streamed CNN videos played smoothly for about 10 seconds before freezing and timing out on several attempts.

Camera and Conclusions
The 2-megapixel camera includes an LED flash and auto-focus. A built-in image editor resizes, crops, and rotates photos, and features some basic effects. Test photos looked OK, with a little noise but decent resolution in shadowy areas, and a slightly soft, grayish focus outdoors. Shutter speeds were just under one second. Recorded 320-by-240 videos had good color balance, but were too jerky at 10 frames per second.

The LG Shine II is a good handset, but I'd like to see its price come down. Otherwise, it runs into headwinds on AT&T's lineup as better phones get discounted. The $99 Sony Ericsson c905a is a vertical slider like the LG Shine II, but it has a vastly more powerful 8.1-megapixel camera with face detection. The $149 Samsung Mythic SGH-a897, our current Editors' Choice for AT&T feature phones, offers mobile TV, a high-resolution touch screen, and plenty of music and video features.

Neither of those phones have the Shine II's aluminum-chic design, though. For thousands of folks to date, that has been enough to seal the deal—and it likely will be enough once again with the Shine II.

Benchmark Test Results
Continuous Talk Time: 3 hours 46 minutes

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