LG Glimmer AX830

A gunmetal gray slider phone with a brushed metal back, the Glimmer is pretty big (4 by 2.05 by 0.59 inches HWD), and relatively heavy at 4.48 ounces. The front of the handset is dominated by a big 2.8 inch 240 by 400 pixel screen. Slide it up to find a lighted keypad of flat metallic keys that are just a bit too small to accurately press with the pad of your finger. There are lock, volume, and camera buttons on the sides, and a 2 mega pixel camera with a weak LED flash on the back.

Buzz up!on Yahoo. The Glimmer uses LG's touch screen interface, very similar to the one on Verizon's VX10000 Voyager and AT&T's Vu CU920.

The phone's home screen has five main icons: Main Menu, Phone, Messaging, Contacts, and a configurable Favorites button, which pops up a grid of nine of applications of your choosing.

Since the Glimmer has a physical keypad, though, you enter text using the phone keys, not with an on screen keyboard. The touch screen is a bit balky.

Often, I needed to press extra firmly to get my touch recognized, and occasionally I had to press twice.

More recent touch screen phones such as Sprint's Samsung Instinct have more accurate touch sensors. Also, you can't "swipe" to scroll in many applications; instead, you have to use some slightly awkward virtual cursor keys. With the physical keyboard popped down, the top half of the phone overhangs the keypad a bit, and the keys are not quite long enough.

I kept hitting the key below the one I meant to press. Once I successfully dialed calls, reception was good and the ear piece was loud. The speaker phone volume was a bit lower than I'd prefer, but it was fine indoors or in the car. Audio sounded a bit compressed and speaker phone transmissions were slightly garbled at one point, but there wasn't much background noise.