If another electronics-maker slaps a pink paint job and some floral prints onto one of its products and then tries to pass it off as a gadget for the fairer sex, this geeky girl is going to be pissed. Come on guys, use your heads a little to think outside the proverbial box and try to come up with something that's actually useful. Look at LG; they just made a lady-centric cellphone, the LX600 Lotus, and it doesn't completely suck.
The Lotus is compact at 3.3 x 2.4 x 0.7 inches and looks like, well, a makeup compact. True, this design increases the phone's cute factor by a power of ten but it also lowers its useful index by a power of twenty. Because it's so small, the QWERTY keys are crammed together making it difficult to dial, text or even navigate around menus — even if you're blessed with dainty digits.
Available through Sprint, the phone has access to the company's One Click service, providing users with instant access to Google, navigation services and instant messaging clients on a brilliant 2.4-inch screen. And there's also EV-DO access, meaning streaming TV, music and radio. A 2-megapixel camera handles image-capturing duties with pics that look surprisingly decent. Decent unless you apply the included Fun Frames feature. This idiotic application lets you apply tacky effects to otherwise solid images. Sigh. Sure, sticking kittens, clown makeup and pirate eye patches onto the visage of your BFF is fun for maybe 30 seconds but afterward, novelty degrades into kitsch and odds are you'll never use the application (at least soberly) ever again.
You can pick up the Lotus in either jet-black or purple (overlaid with a floral print) color schemes. But pretty faces aside, we're still not convinced you're the one for us, Lotus. Yeah you're on the right track with your 262,000-color screen and tightly packed form factor, but we just need more from a phone — especially one we'll be locked down with for two years. Sure you're a fun fling but at the end of the day we'd much rather have a meaningful relationship with a handset that has a less haphazard keypad, more included memory and a smarter interface.