BUILD & DESIGN
The Vortex starts off with a fairly basic design; a rounded tablet shape that’s slightly curvier and more tapered than the iPhone, but still holds to a basically rectangular form.
The plastic casing has a rubbery coating, giving both excellent traction and a good feel in the hand. Overall, it’s a very comfortable phone to hold. It’s fairly light and the weight is well distributed, so it feels balanced, while the build quality is durable. You could very easily take this for being a much more expensive phone based on the feel of it.
Verizon offers this model in either a black or violet outer casing.
Screen
The dominant feature of this device is the 3.2-inch 320 x 480 display.
Like almost all new touchscreens, it’s a capacitive display, meaning it reacts to fingers rather than pressure. As you might expect, this requires you to be accurate with your fingertips, but that’s made surprisingly easy with its sensitive screen.
Other Buttons & Controls
My biggest complaint with the Vortex’s design is the same one I’ve had with all similar devices — text input via touchscreen keyboard is slower and more awkward than using a “real” keyboard. Not to mention the nearly two-thirds of screen space that it takes up, sometimes obscuring other things you’d rather see. Nevertheless, that’s the trade-off one makes for this class of device.
Besides the touchscreen, the only other controls to be found on the Vortex are the side volume keys and the four front navigation buttons. These are “real” buttons rather than touch-sensitive ones, so you’re rewarded by a nice tactile click when you press one.
I do have to thank LG’s engineers for having made the device’s microSD slot accessible without removing the battery cover, something that’s increasingly rare these days. Here, the card slot (and the 2 GB card the phone comes bundled with) are protected by a small attached cover which blends into the side of the phone when not in use.
PERFORMANCE
The LG Vortex runs Android OS 2.2, Google’s operating system for smartphones. This is easy to use and comes with a bunch of software that will let you do just about anything you could want to do with a phone.
Despite being a “low end” smartphone, the Vortex doesn’t give up many points on features. Most of the corners are cut in a few core areas: its screen is the basic half-VGA, which is the minimum standard for Android; the processor is “only” 600 MHz as compared to the 1000 and 1200 MHz processors that’re found in the newer Droid models; and it only has 200 MB of internal memory, although as noted above, it’s bundled with a 2 GB microSD card. Otherwise, much of the spec sheet is intact. The Vortex retains Wi-Fi, GPS, accelerometer, digital compass, even the camera’s auto-focus.
Having recently used the Motorola Droid Pro, which runs on a 1000 MHz processor with its own dedicated graphics subsystem, going to the 600 MHz Vortex is definitely a noticeable change. To make up for the lesser speed and lack of a GPU, the menus and visual effects are simpler and there are fewer visual transitions. Those things aside, the menus open snappily, the applications launch fast, and I have yet to grumble at the thing for slowing down. For regular day-to-day use, it’s quite comfortable and responsive.
