Customer Reviews

LG Ally Android Phone (Verizon Wireless)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

This is my first smart phone. I had the Motorola Droid for about three days and returned it and replaced it with the LG Ally. The reason was simple...the Ally has an external Talk and End button. Unlike the Droid which offers only one way to end a call and that's via a touch screen, I can end a call hitting the End button...regardless of whether the screen is dark or the phone has navigated to another screen. Ever been leaving a VM and want to hang up but you can't??

Granted, the outside physical features of the Ally appear to be identical to the LG Envy Touch (which is why I rated it 4 stars vs 5 stars)...but it performs just the same as the Droid as I believe they have the same operating system. Also, the slide-out keyboard is so much better than the Droid. The Droid's letters on the slide-out keyboard were extremely flat yet the Ally's physical keyboard is huge and the keys are raised and nicely separated.

Truthfully, the Droid would have been a perfect phone for me had it an external Talk and End button. This feature is extremely important to me, which is why I returned the Droid and replaced it with the Ally. Some people think I downgraded, but I don't see how. The only thing I lost was the 8MP camera. The Aly has the 3MP. In addition, the price between the Ally and the Droid is extreme. Consider that the Droid is $199 and the Ally is $49. And Costco has the Ally for FREE (with a 2-yr contract) and they included a car charger, home charger and ear buds for free as well. Go figure. Overall I'm ecstatic about the Ally and could never go back to a regular phone.

I've been an active user, including many apps, since purchasing this phone 3 weeks ago and had a Blackberry for 2 years prior.

This phone is a bit thicker but lighter than Moto Droid which my wife owns. The LG Ally screen is a bit shorter and narrower than the Motorola but I find that a positive, giving the whole phone a smaller footprint and requiring a smaller belt pouch. Small but thicker size means less flex and less torque on the screen in response to external forces. I also prefer the LG Ally's smoother exterior contours over the sharp edges of the Motorola or the HTC. I've always found LG build quality to be superb.

LG showed true genius in choosing physical (rather than virtual) buttons for Send, End, Homepage, Menu, Back & Search which are available 100% of the time regardless of screen content. As with all Droids, get a good Task-killer app (I use Advanced Task Killer) to shut down unnecessary running apps when turning off the phone; it saves a lot of battery power.

Ok. Are you ready?

- Cell phone
- Navigation system (GPS)
- Email
- Web browser
- mp3 player
- video player
and all the features in a SINGLE DEVICE. Oh sure, everyone has laughed at me because it took me SO LONG to get a GPS but this device has IT ALL!!!!!!!

Be prepared to sign up for Google (no big deal).

LOVE THE RAISED KEYBOARD. I was considering the Motorola droid but bought this one because it's lighter, rounded corners and raised keyboard to make keys easier to find and press.

LOVE IT LOVE IT LOVE IT!!!!!!

I even used it on vacation to navigate to the beach, play youtube videos for my nephews, find restauraunts via voice and check my email.

I want to know when this is going to evolve into a computer -- all they need is a larger hard drive and a monitor to plug it in to.

This is my first smart phone and am absolutely thrilled. I had intended to wait for the iphone to be available on another carrier but who knows how long that will be! Now that I've had my Ally for a few months, I don't think I will even get the a fore mentioned device. I love the external keyboard as well as the touch keypad.The touch is nicely responsive(not like the Apple products but still good). This phone does everything. GPS navigation, internet, phone, games, camera, etc. I have 2 complaints. First is the internal memory could be bigger. I'm limited with the apps I can add, but so often I find I wasn't using them anyhow. They're easily uninstalled in the manage apps section. I still have several apps on it. Secondly it won't play the videos that I transferred to it from my old phone. It plays the video but it has no audio. If anyone knows how to fix this, please post it. If you want a well rounded phone, this is the one. Easily connected with my blue-tooth and it comes with a 4gb sd card. The battery has held up well for me also. The first week it didn't but I was on it 24/7 playing with it. I still give it a 5 star even with my 2 complaints.

The Ally is a great Android phone at an affordable price. The screen is a little small and the processor lags at times, but it doesn't take away from the overall incredible value this phone offers. I highly recommend it. One note: stay away from the "Youmail" app, great concept but it was causing random reboots. I almost returned my Ally before realizing it was a software issue.

I have been using the Ally for about six months now. I did not purchase it from Amazon, but I wanted to put a review here so people could get an idea of what they are getting into if they get this phone.

First, the good things: The screen is sharp and pictures and graphics look great on it. The touch screen responds well (when the phone is not messing up, as noted below). Nice ability to customize things from alarm clocks to icons and everything else. The phone operates on the Android platform, and has a nice choice of apps and Google integration. Since it has this Google integration, you get free maps and navigation right out of the box (forget buying a GPS!). Personally, I don't use navigation very often (call me old-fashioned), but I can certainly see the value in this. I have used it a couple times and works well, when I can actually get the GPS to locate me. Text messages are organized and displayed in an Instant Messaging-style format, with messages from a certain person or group of people grouped into one, which I prefer over "old-style" text message listings on old phones, where every single text is displayed separately. The desktop has five separate screens, leaving tons of room for you to create custom desktop layouts and to organize everything the way you want it. The camera takes very good pictures. Wi-Fi ability is nice and very advantageous if you don't plan on getting the unlimited data pack. The slideout keyboard is probably better than many on the market, and also has an on-screen keyboard that responds surprising accurately.

Now, the bad things: This phone is incredibly buggy and slow most of the time. The bugs are numerous- you would think LG could release an update or patch to fix even a few of these things, but so far I have not seen or heard about any major patches. The phone will occasionally reboot for no reason. The phone is slow and laggy most of the time... a couple times it was so bad I simply had to put it down in disgust and walk away and do something else while it finished doing whatever it was doing. Recently, no matter which icon I touched on the desktop, the camera would open up. Text messaging, phone, browser, it didn't matter- they all went to the camera. A restart fixed it but it was annoying. The phone also regularly fails to recognize if you have turned it or not (or sometimes assumes that you have turned it when you haven't), meaning that it will stay in portrait mode when turned sideways, or the other way around too. It is especially bad about this when texting. Battery life is pretty bad, but acts goofy; some days you can talk for half an hour on the phone and drain the battery almost completely, while other days you can talk for 2 hours and barely use half the battery. I have had no significant improvement in battery life when using various task-managing and task-killing applications. If you get this phone and you are going to depend on it for whatever reason, never leave home without your charger. You will likely not make it a whole day of "normal" use without having to plug it in. There have been several occasions where I would touch the screen to call a certain contact, but the phone would actually dial a completely different contact, seemingly at random. If this had happened once, I could let it slide as me possibly having accidentally touched the wrong contact. But it has happened numerous times, with a couple times I KNOW I touched the right name but the phone still dialed someone else. I have also had a similar problem with text messages. I remember one instance especially, where I sent a text to someone, and the phone kept no record or display of it. Magically, a couple days later, I sent a completely different text to a completely different person, and the old missing text from a couple days ago appeared from out of nowhere under that different contacts name! Use caution if you call or send potentially sensitive material. Finally, one bug that is extremely annoying is that the Ally will not display album art from music files that you legally own. It usually will not display the artist name either. It will usually display the song name, and sometimes the album name. I tried using WMA and MP3 formats, and neither would work. I actually spent a couple hours on the phone first with Verizon about this issue, and after they couldn't answer the question, we had a three-way call between myself, Verizon, and LG. The LG employee, after checking it out, said basically (I am not making this up) that that is the way the phone is and it can't be fixed. He even said he had an Ally in his hand while we were trying to figure it out, and he said his did the same thing.

So, the bottom line...
Unfortunately, this phone seems to have been rushed to market by LG without proper testing and quality control. I have always been happy with LG products before, so this phone was a little disappointing. I am not going to say I hate this phone- when it is working right, it is a great phone. But the longer I have it the more annoying the bugs become. The aggravating part is that this could potentially be one of the best phones I have ever owned if it would just work right and not be so laggy all the time. Luckily, I got mine for free, and that is my recommendation to you- don't pay a dime for this phone, but if you can get it for free, and you don't mind putting up with the bugs, get it.

*UPDATE 01-26-2011:* My Ally downloaded and installed an update a few nights ago. The update improved the GUI and functionality, but best of all, it seems to have taken *most* of the bugs and lagginess away. The phone is running much smoother and quicker than it ever has. Even though this upgrade for the phone is long overdue and the phone should never have been released as buggy as it was, I am still going to raise my rating for this phone from 3 stars to 4 stars; as I stated above, this could be among the top phones I have owned if it weren't for all the bugs. Well, they seem to be fixed for the most part, and I am falling in love with this phone all over again.
Of course, by this time, I don't know if they even still make/sell this phone, so this update may be pointless.

As my first Android experience, this phone has left a sour taste in my mouth. My first Ally experienced random reboots and, after about about a week, the vibrate functionality began to stop working for long periods of time. Also, as pointed out by reviews around the web, overall the phone feels laggy.

I received a replacement about 2 weeks ago, and overall I've been fairly happy, minus the random reboots (which do seem to be daily). But last night was the final straw: After my battery died while at work, I took the phone home to recharge and it has entered a perpetual reboot cycle which continues into today. Removing the battery does nothing. Once it's replaced, the phone just continues rebooting. Extremely frustrated at this point.

While the phone was working as advertised, I was generally pleased with the functionality (and price point). But it's not worth this headache. Shame on you, LG.

This is kind of your basic Android phone, but that's not a bad thing by any means. It's awesome, because it's sooo much easier to use than the rest of the Android phones, because this phone doesn't have all the unnecessary apps, buttons, colors the rest of the phones have. Nuff said!

The LG Ally is about my 4th smart phone over the years. I like it a lot and would buy it again after getting to know its strengths and weaknesses for the past two months or so. I like that
* it's smaller than the droids but it's big enough for my purposes
* its battery lasts me about 3 days (vs. 1 day for the period when I used to leave the bluetooth and wifi hotspot sensors on and leave the phone on overnight)
* it has a keyboard--and a great one for its size
* it has a full length monitor vs. the half length monitors some devices have--it comes in great when reading news articles and sending emails and text messages
* it charges from around 29% to 100% in about 2 hours
I wish that:
- it had a copy paste functionality like a Blackberry where you could easily select text you're reading and copy and paste it to another screen, like your contacts notes area
- its android 2.1 software were even more intuitive so you could more easily post app's and bookmarks to your home/top screens; still, it's more intuitive than almost all my prior devices except for my first Blackberry
- it had android 2.2
- i could get the tethering to work. I've been told that it should work and that it shouldn't work. I haven't been able to get it to tether.
- it were much faster (something I'll hope for all devices till they're faster than the speed of light)
My prior phones included Blackberrys, an HTC Mogul and some forgettable clunkers.

For years I resisted buying an LG phone, as I was not confident that a company that also makes appliances like refrigerators could make a good mobile phone. Well, the LG enVtouch proved me wrong and when Verizon offered me the chance to upgrade a year early, I gave the Ally a chance. It is noticeably smaller than the HTC Droid Incredible and Motorola's Droid family, but it has an extremely crisp display that shows video very well. It is fairly easy to get up and running with the phone right out of the box and, as echoed in another review, I love the dedicated HOME, BACK, and MENU keys. The camera is only 3.2 MP, but still takes solid pictures (and if you are really looking to take professional-looking shots, I don't think you would be using your camera phone for that). Text communications are organized as threads in an e-mail, so you can see at the same time your message and your correspondent's. The navigation tool is a joy and the voice navigation feature is both highly sensitive to voice and intelligent enough that you don't have to speak as the pace of cold molasses.

4 complaints:
(1) Battery life. Unless you rarely turn off WiFi and you leave the information receipt feature deactivated (for instance, live, real-time temperature updates), you can expect about 2/3 of a day of battery life. If you make about 3 hours of calls in a day, it will likely be half of that.

(2) Memory. Apps get stored in the on-board memory, not the 2 GB microSD card that comes with it. So if you send lots of texts and load large apps, you can easily run out of memory. But then again, how many apps do people really use in a given day?

(3) Slow accelerometer. When you orient the phone in landscape view with the dedicated keyboard closed, the phone's display will sometimes stay in portrait mode, even on the home screen, unless you open the keyboard.

(4) Virtual Keyboard. The virtual keyboard in portrait mode is very cramped and not terribly accurate, especially for someone with large hands. But you can simply switch to landscape and use either the virtual or the wonderfully fast dedicated keyboard.

For those looking for an affordable Android phone with great, practical features AND a dedicated keyboard, this is an excellent buy. But for the 4 complaints above, it would be 5 stars.