It's Time?

Well my contract with Telus has been up since October. I decided long ago that I would switch to a camera/phone rather than a phone with a hint of camera (1.3mp just doesn't cut it, never has for anything more than a phone's background.)

Shortly before Christmas, I did some reading on the LG IQ and it looked amazing, on paper at least. I went in to the local Telus shop and asked to take one for a test drive. I fooled around with it for maybe 10 minutes. Looking at the menus, trying the camera out various other things. Unfortunately I couldn't do too much as it wasn't my phone and obviously wasn't connected to a network.

Of course, being a fan of LG phones/devices I decided to risk it any bought it. I figured I just wasn't used to the phone and that's why things were goofy to me. Apparently my initial experiments weren't too far from the mark. I ran in to the problem of random freezing. More of a 10 second annoyance than a real problem. Didn't think much of it as my current phone tends to randomly die without any warning (thank you child slobber). I ran in to some confusion with the contacts. If I recall there were a couple different contact menus displaying the information in different formats and also permitted the addition of contacts in different ways that wouldn't always mesh with the other contact menu(s). I did have an issue with that.

My second biggest gripe about the phone had to be with text messaging. I found at least two different ways to access the inbox(es). Each inbox looked and functioned different and only had part of the required information. One way lacked the date and time of the message. Another way lacked the previous messages in the conversation or with that contact. It was very troublesome going back and fourth to figure things out. I also had trouble deleting messages from both inboxes at the same time. I would delete a conversation in one inbox and it would still show up in the other.

And that leaves me with my biggest gripe about the device. It seems way too heavy on animation, looking cool compared to being funtional or smooth. When accessing the camera for instance, it has a little bit of an animated opening to it. When a picture is taken, an animated shutter closes with the picture and is quite slow. It made it difficult to take decent pictures, especially when multiple shots were used. I found other programs and settings just seemed to be more based on animation/cool looks than being straight forward (plain) words/buttons like I would expect for simplicity and functionality.

Of course, I had gone through all of this before I found these forums and before there were many meaningful reviews out there to be found and definitely before many people were able to begin tweaking/modding the things.

Now my question is, is there a modification, bank of software, upgrade or anything else out there that makes things a bit more appealing to people like me who prefer plain and simple appearances rather than animations and cool graphics at every turn?

If I can't find a way to make things less flashy, I may just need to stick things out with my current device until a suitible replacement comes out.

That being said, I have been impressed with the Samsung Omnia (much less flashy and seems to be more organized) and the Motorola Milestone so far (I have to try it out again, the lady was busy and kept asking if I was done with it).

Just my thoughts and a question.

Thanks!

Camaro

I had the first one, the second looks familiar but there's also the speech bubble view of the messages as well.

That's why I want a phone with a decent camera. Generally I bring my real camera everywhere, but I do happen to forget it once in a while and I need a semi-decent substitute.

Unfortunately none of the mods or information that I can now find was available to me back then and I didn't have much time, or know how to fiddle with everything.

Is it easy to fix some of my gripes? Like having a single, more comprehensive yet simpler messaging view? And ways to get rid of some of the extra flash and pizaz that I really don't want or need?

Or another option if you want the basic look with no flashy anything is to go into Start/settings/Today and click on the Items tab on the bottom ..now uncheck Windows Default (or LG idles if that was what you were using) and check anything else you want on your main screen to show up..like date Messaging Task, Wireless etc...

This will give you a very basic look (WM 5 look)..no flashy stuff but show you all the basic info you will want to see..

It will also let you run the phone with around 90MB of free program mem (if you use the Tweaker program thats on this forum to eak out every last bit of mem from the phone and it will be smooth as ever.