Customer Reviews

LG Neon GT365 Prepaid GoPhone with $15 Airtime Credit (AT&T)

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(23)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(13)
1 star:		(33)

 

 

I'm a long-time att customer whose old phone went bad. Instead of going to the ATT/ripoff artists, I bought this LG Neon GT365 GoPhone. I swapped my old phone's sim card into this GoPhone, turned it on and WOW!!! It instantly hooked up with the ATT network and worked perfectly from the beginning. I received an automated text from ATT that informed me of my existing account being credited with the $50 airtime credit!!! When I went to my account at att, I found that my device had been updated to this phone and a note was on my account explaining the new credit that had been added to my account.

As for the phone itself: The camera works perfectly; the cell's audio is perfect; the bluetooth works perfectly; the slide-out QWERTY keyboard works really well, even with my big, stubby fingers; the phone and its capabilities are very easy to figure out and use - very intuitive; the battery life is exceptionally good - 3 days between charges; the screen is touch with vibration feedback WHEN YOU DIAL and works really well. To top it all off, I put in a 2GB microSD card and now can store a gazillion pics and tunes.

The thing I can't figure out is the criticism of the battery life that I've read in reviews elsewhere. I text with my kids and wife constantly, usually with a picture going or coming; I bluetooth constantly; I make loads of calls a day to/from my customers yet I am only charging this phone every three days or so?!?!? HAH!!! And when this battery starts going bad, I'll go to the net and pick up a new one for next to nothing - what's so hard about that?

My only knock would be the unbelievably cheesy battery/back cover. It is a really flimsy, cheap, thin piece of molded plastic that took several careful attempts to snap it in place. That being said, I've had no problems with it since. Go figure...

Lastly - I HIGHLY recommend this LG Neon GT365 GoPhone to anybody and everybody! And, FYI, Amazon has the lowest price anywhere! Period! As to the problems someone else reviewing this product had, I have NEVER had a single problem with ANY product that I bought on Amazon that wasn't quickly and fairly resolved by Amazon or the vendors that sell through them.

I highly recommend the phone AND Amazon.com.

I have read a bunch of bad reviews of this phone and consequently was very reluctant to buy it, but the large number of features and reasonable price made me take a chance on it. I did not regret buying this phone at all.

Pros:
- Slide out texting keyboard works great
- mp3 and media player works fine(it supposedly plays mp4 video files as well, I have not tried that)
- microSD slot, although only supports up to 4GB
- Bluetooth, but not for file transfers which limits it a bit
- Decent camera
- Pretty good utilities and contact list app
- Even has a document viewer for pdf's doc's and the like.

Cons:
- Short battery life (I manage 2-4 days before recharging)
- Gives no low battery warning, when the battery runs out it just turns off
- Included java games and apps are trialware and useless

I have had no problems with phone functionality, or freezes, or any other problems frequently mentioned. Maybe more recent firmware versions fixed the teething problems of this phone that earlier users experienced. It does have a small lag doing certain things, but you cannot expect supercomputing speeds from a budget phone. All in all a great, flexible, fun little device.

I had a Samsung Propel, but lost it in December. I needed a new phone with a qwerty keypad, and the LG Neon seemed like a great bargain. You can go to your local Wal-Mart and pick this thing up for less than $100, pop in a sim card, and you're ready to go. Sounds great, right? But after a few weeks, problems began to emerge.
I bought this because I don't need many features. All I wanted was a phone with which I could make calls and send texts, and I wanted a qwerty keypad. This one has a somewhat pleasing design, with buttons spaced out nicely. It also has a touchscreen, but you can only use that to dial numbers, so it's really more of an afterthought. The Neon seemed to perform just fine for what I needed it to do, at first. Then I started noticing the problems.
It's horribly slow. For example; you get a text, you slide the phone open to view it, wait about 2 seconds before you can actually do anything, then you push the button to view the text, and wait about another 2 to 3 seconds for the message to appear on the screen. Everything you do on this phone is like this. The phone is painfully slow.
For some reason, the phone would just turn off from time to time. Not just when it was in my pocket, but often when it was just sitting on a table, with a fully charged battery. But it should also be noted that this phone is pretty bad about unlocking itself in your pocket.
The keypad is a bit frustrating. It can be really tedious typing punctuations and numbers. I don't know how to explain this properly, but it's not a problem I've ever had with other phones. I've just never gotten used to this keypad, and it's such a pain to use numbers and punctuation, that I find myself avoiding typing them whenever possible.
In the past week or so, I've been experiencing a new problem: for some reason, when I make a call, I'll dial the number, and then hear silence for about 10 seconds. Then I hear the person on the other end saying, "hello? hello?" This happens every time I make a call now. My wife said that she picked up the phone a good 5 seconds before she could hear me talking. I don't know what that's all about. I've never had this problem with any other phone, but it was this problem that has finally made me decide to get a new phone.
Go to your local at&t dealer, and play around with their display model. You'll notice that it feels cheaply made. It is, inside and out. There are much better phones for the same price. Samsung makes 2 great phones: the Magnet and the Propel, which are both great, reliable, durable, functioning phones. I got a deal on my Propel back when I renewed my contract, so I don't know its price, but I do know that you can get a Magnet for about the same price as the Neon, and I would strongly advise anyone looking at the Neon to consider the Magnet. I've just bought a Motorola Karma, which you can get for about $160 brand new if you buy it online. That's a good bit more that the Neon, but really, almost anything is better.
I would recommend reading reviews from people who have owned the Neon for a little while, as opposed to those who just bought one. My Neon seemed great at first, but quickly became the worst phone I've ever owned. I almost wrote a really positive review when I first got this thing, but I'm glad I waited, because I would have misinformed people.
Bottom line: this is a cheaply made phone, and there are others in this price range that are much better.

I've used the Neon for almost a year now; finally joined the 21st Century gaining mobile access to e-mail and messaging. Reception and sound are good. It is NOT a "smart phone"; no 3G or 4G web access. It has a better-than-avg camera, still and video, for a phone but no flash. The microSD card makes for easy transfer of pics and files. The speakerphone function works well. The Bluetooth is robust and provides virtually hands-free use in many new cars or with stand-alone BT units. I really like the Neon's solid feel and the slider keyboard. Screen res and quality is excellent. I've carried it in my jeans pocket a lot and its held up to being sat upon and scrunched with keys, etc. Battery life is adequate. Battery life is adequate; I get about 3 days per charge but don't web surf or text very much. Recharges in 2 hours.

Negatives: screen visibility in bright sunlight is marginal, and the battery cover back is too flimsy, uses a proprietary charger plug. I wish that mobile comm mfrs would standardize on mini-USB ports so I wouldn't need to carry three different chargers in my glove box. It plays MP3s, but the controls are clunky; it'll never replace an iPod or Sansa. I haven't tried sending music files to the car audio via Bluetooth.

Well, I have to admit that i was very skeptical before recieving this phone. Many people had said this phone was aweful. After a month (give or take) of use, i have found this phone to be WNODERFUL. I have no problems with the battery, and i love the keyboard. The color ( i have a blue one) is absolutly gorgeous!! Amazon was very quick on shipping, and i have no complaints. i have had no problems at all with this phone, and would recomend it to anyone.

I bought this phone for my teenager son primarily for texting. So far so good. My son likes this phone very much. The phone is with him almost 24/7. Amazing!

I bought this phone to replace one I had that wasn't working well. I need to say though that I do not use this with a gophone plan. I have a regular family plan with AT&T and of course the customer service will not tell you that you can use a gophone as a replacement. If you aren't eligible for an upgrade they will tell you that you have to buy one at full price, usually $200 & up. Gophones work just fine, just don't use the sim card that comes with it, put in the one from your old phone. It actually has directions inside the package that tells you how to use the gophone with your regular plan, and they credit the $50 airtime as like an extra 150 minutes to your plan. As far as the phone, I couldn't be happier. The slide feature is great with the qwerty keyboard and the battery life has been great. We have three LG phones in our plan and they all use the same chargers, which is very convenient.

I bought the LG Neon in Aug 2010 at Walmart. This phone was under a $100 and was a GoPhone. However, this phone will drop every other call you make! Picture texts never go though and it is very rare for you to be able to send pictures back. Internet on these phones are horriable as well. I believe people who say this phone is amazing and great are from AT&T. Because if they are using the same phone I am, then it has to be fake or they are reviewing on the wrong phone, very unlikely. Also, if you want to buy this phone, then you must by a personal case online. This phone is out of date and AT&T does not sell anymore cases for this phone. Texting is the only thing good about this phone. I like to feel the buttons when I texted, and it filps, which it cool to me. All in all, do not buy this phone!

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PRO:

This telephone appears, at a glance, to be akin to a smart phone, a sort of fusion of an iphone and blackberry.

In principle, it's a very primitive version of that.
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CONS:

1. But in application, the hardware used in this phone is ridiculously inadequate for the software they installed to carry out the tasks. This leaves the phone agonizingly slow for "smart" tasks like email, instant messaging, browsing the web, et cetera.

Worse, the phone is so slow that these problems manifest even if you wish to make a simple phone call:

2. Depending on what else the Neon may be doing behind the scenes, it can take it up to 50 seconds simply to load the software that lets you hear the caller on the other end of the line. To you, it's fifty seconds of dead silence...but on the other end, the person you were calling has picked up the phone, said "hello" several times, and hung up on you, wondering what's going on.

But wait, there's more:

3. Simply opening the phone to access the keyboard takes the phone between two and ten seconds to catch up. Even typing can lag so far behind that you can see it.

4. The keyboard, too, is very awkward. The buttons are too flat, don't push easily enough, and the layout is subtly less ergonomic than most other phones with keyboards.

5. And don't be fooled by mention of the "touch screen"; it only works for dialing numbers, and even then activating/deactivating it is so awkward that it presents more of a problem than simply opening the keyboard and typing there (which is no easy feat, itself).

6. Oh, and as an extra bonus, this phone will occasionally turn off while you are using the keyboard, or opening/closing it. No shutdown process, it just suddenly is black, and must be started back up...and starting up takes between one and three minutes. You will find other reviews mentioning this bug.

7. On top of everything else, this phone lacks a feature that would make typing on its awkward keyboard tolerable; it does not have the ability to predict words you are typing, the way most phones do, leaving you to type them all out, manually. Perhaps even LG decided it's too slow to handle that feature.
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SUMMARY:

This phone was a wonderful idea...a smartphone-style device for pay-as-you-go customers.

But in application, it's actually more trouble than an equally priced non-smartphone, even for "smart" internet tasks.

* If you must get a pay-as-you-go, pick a top of the line conventional-style over the Neon. Its "smartphone" features prove even more inadequate. For example, you end up able to type faster on a normal 12 key pad than this horrible "keyboard".

* If you are considering this as the cheapest, entry-level smartphone, save up for ANY alternative, or settle for an equally priced non-smartphone, which will end up working better in EVERY way.

Don't hold this against LG: It is impressive that they were willing to even try to design this phone, but the hardware is simply inadequate for the phone/internet software and OS they installed on it.

It took a bit to adjust to the keypad. I formerly had an LG VUE and loved the touch-screen. However, that particular phone malfunctioned multiple times and the screen became unresponsive. The Neon is a great messaging phone. The phone sends and receives pic and video messages much quicker than the VUE (which sometimes didn't send image files at all.) The camera is fine quality for a cell. The only things I am not crazy about: lack of keypad (unless you slide the phone open) when calling, and no night feature in camera mode (that I can find.) Otherwise, the phone works well, sound quality is good, etc. Good product for the price.