LG Lucid review

I've knocked LG in the past for clearly aping other manufacturers' handset designs — the Nitro HD is basically a knockoff Galaxy S II — so here I'll give credit where it's due: the Lucid is a much more original design, and is by and large a successful one. The Lucid's 11.4mm thickness isn't exactly slender, but there's a shiny silver stripe around the edges that makes the phone look much sleeker and thinner than it is. The stripe is wide at the top of the phone and thin around the bottom and sides (like the Sony Tablet S, or the Samsung Series 9), and adds some nice design flair in a sea of all-black handsets. Design-induced placebo or otherwise, the phone also feels thin when you hold it, and is pretty comfortable to hold and use. Its glossy, red and black-striped back scuffs easily and is extremely prone to fingerprints — it also feels vaguely slippery a la LG's other recent Verizon smartphone, the Spectrum, but it's not nearly as bad on the Lucid.

The Lucid’s power button lies at the top of the silver stripe, on the phone’s right side. There’s another knob on the left side in the same spot, which I hoped was a camera shutter or some cool function button, but no such luck — it’s purely an accoutrement and doesn’t even depress, which is odd to say the least. A single-button volume rocker is nestled next to the silver stripe, set on the tapered edge so that your fingers can find the control but your eyes never see it.

Otherwise, there’s not much to see here. Below the 4-inch display are the standard four capacitive Android buttons, which is a small improvement for LG; the Nitro HD and Spectrum both awkwardly combined the Menu and Search buttons, and I’m glad to see them split here, but the icons still retain LG’s odd (and occasionally inscrutable) redesign. Attention was clearly paid to keeping the Lucid as minimalist as possible, and LG was mostly successful — ports are set unnoticeably into the tapered edges, and the only eye-catching design flaw is that the company obviously couldn’t resist slapping large LG logos onto the front and back of the device, accompanying a Verizon logo on the front and a 4G LTE logo on the back.

When I bought a Samsung Fascinate a couple of years ago, the 4-inch display felt positively enormous. Funny how things change. Now the Lucid feels downright small, the adorable little brother of the Spectrum, the Galaxy Nexus, or the Droid RAZR. I still think four inches is close to the perfect display size, though — it’s large enough to see a lot at once, but small enough that my medium-sized hands can wrap around the phone and my fingers can reach any spot on the screen. It won’t double as your living room TV, but the Lucid’s display is plenty large for my tastes.

I may yearn for the Fascinate’s size, but you know what I don’t miss? Its resolution. Unfortunately, LG missed that distinction, and bestowed upon the Lucid an 800 x 480 IPS LCD. 800 x 480 just doesn’t leave you with enough screen real estate, and on a 4-inch display it makes icons enormous and adds enough jaggies to text that you’re not going to want to read on this phone for more than a couple of minutes. It’s hard to get over, especially when there are so many phones with 720p displays available from Verizon, from the Galaxy Nexus to the HTC Rezound; the Rezound can also be purchased for $49.99 at the moment, which makes the Lucid a really hard sell.

The display is bright and has excellent viewing angles, but despite the Nova branding it has some real problems — blacks aren’t nearly as black as I’d like, and all colors feel a little washed out. You can readily make out individual pixels, too. Like the Spectrum, the actual display also appears to be far below the protective Gorilla Glass coating, so it feels like you’re not actually touching the screen when you’re using the phone.

The rear lens is only average, but not for the reasons I’m accustomed to. It actually takes reasonably sharp photos, but most of the time I didn’t get the shot I was hoping for. The phone claims to have autofocus, but it’s really more like auto-pretend-to-focus. The square indicating the focus point bounces to let you know it’s found focus — it turns green if you use the tap-to-focus feature, but both actions indicate the shot is in focus. Except it isn’t: almost every time, I ended up with slightly blurry, out of focus photos even when shooting something still that the phone claimed was in focus. Shooting far-away subjects worked okay, and photos look fine, but for anything within arm’s reach the Lucid’s hit or miss (and mostly miss). The dreaded pink-circle effect is here, too, ever so slightly discoloring any white-background shot you take.

The rear camera also shoots 1080p video, but resolution certainly doesn’t denote quality. Video is soft and suffers from the same vaguely unfocused effect as still images, plus there’s no image stabilization to be found so just about anything you shoot will be shaky.

The front-facing camera’s VGA resolution means it shoots images at a 640 x 480 resolution. If you’re counting, that’s a lot less than one megapixel, and even the tiny photos you get will be noisy and soft. But, as you’d expect, it does fine for video chat or making sure there’s nothing in your teeth.

The camera app is a bright spot — it’s actually one of the few things manufacturers consistently improve over stock Android. LG’s app puts lots of settings in a menu on the left side of the display, so you can quickly add a filter or tweak some basic settings. The app boots quickly, too, and swaps easily between video and still recording. Of course, you can tweak to your heart’s content and the Lucid’s photos will never be great, but you can certainly improve them a bit.

There’s a 1.2GHz, dual-core processor inside the Lucid (LG won’t specify which one), and while it’s a spec class below the 1.5GHz Snapdragon chip inside the Spectrum, in practice the difference is almost non-existent, likely thanks to the 1GB of RAM in the device. The Lucid is quite snappy, doing almost everything without any lag or delay — or at least not any more than Gingerbread itself brings into the fray, like the occasional lag when launching or closing an app. Even LG’s bizarre live wallpapers (when your phone is charging, it’s a jar of fireflies) don’t seem to hinder the device’s performance. Grand Theft Auto III is my go-to game for testing a device’s graphics and processing capabilities, and the game played without any skips or stutters, though single pixels would occasionally black out for a second, which was odd.

The Lucid’s call quality was okay, but it gets highest marks for something you won’t yourself notice — the microphone is good enough, especially on speakerphone, to the point where you can be heard even if the phone is several feet away. The speaker and loudspeaker, on the other hand, both compress sound to the point where it sounds like the other person has the phone in their mouth while they talk. It’s not a dealbreaker or a particularly huge dropoff from other phones, but call quality isn’t a highlight of the Lucid. Reception was solid, though, and I never dropped a call in my time with the Lucid.

Verizon’s LTE network is excellent, and thus so is the Lucid’s data connectivity — though it’s not as fast as some other Verizon devices. I tested the Lucid next to a Droid RAZR, and while download speeds were about the same, ranging from 11Mbps to 13Mbps, the Lucid’s upload speeds capped at about 6Mbps while the RAZR consistently went as high as 17Mbps. 11Mbps down and 6Mbps up is awesomely fast, but it’s odd that the RAZR’s upload speeds were consistently so much higher.

LTE’s a big battery drain, though, and best I can tell there’s only one actual solution: cram a gigantic battery into the phone, a la the Droid RAZR Maxx. The Lucid’s 1700mAh battery is a decent size, but it’s more like the RAZR than the Maxx, and so is the Lucid’s battery life. I could eke out a full day of moderate use without charging (that’s where the lower-res screen is a big advantage), but barely. The phone also drains like crazy on standby, losing 40-60 percent of its battery while sitting on my bedside table overnight if it was connected to LTE. The moral of the story? Wi-Fi is your friend.