LG Escape Review
We've seen plenty of value-priced phones that scream "budget" with bulky designs. That's not the case here. The Escape weighs 4.5 ounces and measures 5 x 2.5 x 0.37 inches, making this device lighter than the $99 Motorola Atrix HD (4.9 ounces) and almost as thin (0.33 inches). The Samsung Galaxy Victory 4G LTE for Sprint is 0.5 inches thick and 4.9 ounces and other Compatible Parts .
The plastic back of the Escape has an attractive but somewhat slippery patterned design, but the ridged black plastic band that surrounds the device ensures a firm grip. This band has chrome accents on either side, which gives the Escape a more premium vibe. Beneath the display are three capacitive buttons (Back, Home, Menu).
A pair of speakers sits along the bottom of the device along with a micro USB slot, and the headphone jack sits up top. The power button is on the left while the long volume rocker is on the right.
Reading text on the Escape's glossy 4.3-inch, 960 x 540p display was nice and crisp, particularly on CNN.com and GameInformer.com. When we went to VGCats.com to read a few comics, the qHD IPS display was a little washed-out.
The handset's display measured 279 lux on our light meter, falling below the 300 lux Android phone category average. The Nitro HD and the Atrix HD were considerably brighter at 324 and 561 lux, respectively.
When we watched the definition trailer of "The Master," color was rather dark. Phillip Seymour Hoffman's character's face was oversaturated, giving him an angry visage even while happily hugging a woman. In addition, pixilation was rampant during darker scenes. Viewing angles were shallow, with color inversion with a slight move to the left or right.
The Escape's twin speakers can fill a small room, but that doesn't mean you should crank them up. Azealia Banks' "Liquorice" was overcome by painfully brassy cymbals and distorted synthesized instrumentals. We struggled to hear the artist's bombastic flow and flowery alto over the din.
The Escape features a number of keyboards, including the standard stock Android keyboard. Similar to the LG Intuition, the Escape also features four LG keyboards (QWERTY, Phone, Handwriting and Shape writer). We preferred the Shape writer keyboard with its Swype-like trace writing functionality like the IBM ThinkPad Edge E520 Keyboard . It shaved a few seconds off of composing emails and texts. Each of the keyboards features haptic feedback with strong vibration
Running Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) with an Optimus 3.0 overlay, the Escape follows LG's convenience-first model. Swiping anywhere on the lockscreen unlocks the phone. Users can visit the Settings menu to switch clocks and widgets and add a total of four shortcuts to the bottom of the screen.
Users can also customize the seven home screens and . The main home screen features a Google search bar, a Yahoo! widget with date, weather and time and space for 8 apps. Pinching a home screen took us to another screen where we could change the default home screen.
A small thin line toward the bottom of the display marks the current page. It also separates the apps from the omnipresent shortcuts (Phone, Messaging, Web and Apps) bar at the bottom of the display. We liked having the ability to swap out apps in the shortcuts bar, which made personalizing the device easy Apple MacBook Pro Keyboard Cover
Click to EnlargeWe activated the Recent Apps menu by holding down the Home button. Similar to the Optimus G, long-pressing an app launches a smaller menu for viewing app info or removing it from the list. We could also create custom app icons from LG's generic photo cache or from photos in our gallery. We also created folders on the home screen by dragging icon on top of one another. Resizing folders is as easy as long-pressing and dragging one or more of the blue corners surrounding the folder.
AT&T has added a welcome twist to Web browsing in the form of the Browser Bar. Located at the bottom of the display or right above the keyboard, the bar is comprised of two pages. The first page primarily deals with social networking and sharing. There are buttons to recommend pages on Facebook, tweet links to Twitter and share via email or text messaging. There's even a button to launch a mini-Facebook browser. The second page launches Yahoo! affiliated news such as Sports, Entertainment and Popular articles Apple MacBook Pro Keyboard Cover .
We appreciated the convenience of the bar when sharing a few GIFs with our Facebook friends and Twitter followers. Our favorite component of the Browser Bar is the ability to create buttons for our favorite Web pages.
For more Apple Keyboard Cover