T-Mobile LG Sentio GS505 review

The LG Sentio is a middle-of-the-road feature phone fore T-Mobil. Similar to the recently-reviewed LG Vu Plus, it has a touch display and uses the standard user interface developed by LG for touch devices. If you insist on having a touch device, the Sentio does OK, but there are other non-smartphone devices that do better. It’s one device that earns its $70 price point.

T-Mobile LG Sentio has a nearly perfect size and shape. It is small, thin, and light, and rounded edges make it very comfortable to hold and use. The materials are all plastic, and are coated in a soft-touch finish. The T-MobileLG Sentio doesn’t come off feeling cheap. It feels well put together and will easily slip into a pocket and disappear.

The Sentio‘s front face is mostly dominated by the 3-inch display. There are three buttons below it: Send, Back, and End/Power. All three have a pronounced shape and are placed far enough apart that it is easy to find and use them. Travel and feedback of these controls is perfect, offering a nice solid “click.”

The volume rocker is placed on the left edge of the Sentio. It has two little humps that make finding it a cinch. There is a task button below it, which lets the Sentio switch between applications. It’s a little small, and harder to find. These two buttons both had good travel and feedback. On the bottom of the left edge, LG has placed the microUSB port for charging and accessories. There is no headset jack to speak of, so Bluetooth is your only headset option. That’s a disappointment.

There is a dedicated camera button on the right edge of the Sentio. It is small, and travel and feedback are minimal. It’s a one-stage button, as the Sentio has a fixed-focus camera. The only other control is a lock key on the top of the Sentio. Pressing it quickly puts the display to sleep. Pressing it twice quickly will wake it up and unlock it. Pressing any other button on the phone when it is asleep will wake up the display and show the lock screen. It also is small and has minimal travel and feedback.

The microSD port is located under the battery cover, but thankfully not under the battery itself. That means hot-swapping is OK.

It may be small and somewhat boring to look at, but everything about the Sentio works as it is supposed to, and nothing gets in the way of using the device.

Screen

The Sentio has a 3-inch display measuring 240 by 400 pixels. For me, this is too small and too few pixels. It leaves little room on the screen for icons, applications, and text. I won’t say that things feel squished, but it is definitely tight. The resolution is such that text, icons and graphics all have rough edges and sometimes appear “out of focus” or soft. It also isn’t very bright. It is readable indoors, but outside it is almost impossible to see. You have to seek out shade or a shadow to see anything on the display outside. That gets old quick. The Sentio’s display works, but doesn’t impress.

Signal

The Sentio performed admirably when it came to collecting T-Mobile’s EDGE/3G signal. Most times I checked the status indicator, it had a full 5 bars to report. Very seldom did it dip down to 2 or 3 bars. I did, however, lose the 3G connection and fall back to T-Mobile’s EDGE network in an area with questionable coverage. That only happened once, though. In my experience, the signal never played a role in the Sentio’s ability to connect or receive phone calls. I didn’t drop any calls when using it. Data sessions were almost universally slow, however. Despite the 3G network, web sites were slow, slow, slow to load. In side-by-side tests, almost every other 3G T-Mobile device I have on hand bested the Sentio in terms of data speeds.

Sound

Phone calls through the Sentio were muddy at best. There was lots of static, hiss, and the sound occasionally dropped out completely for a second or two. Voices in the earpiece sounded muffled and digitized. Those with whom I spoke reported similar issues on their end. This means the Sentio is not a great voice device. The good news is that the volume of the earpiece, ringers, and speakerphone is bombastically loud. You can make the Sentio loud enough to tick off someone like Eddie Van Halen.

Battery

The Sentio’s battery fared pretty well. In my tests, I was easily able to eke two days out of it, with plenty of calls and messaging. Turning on the Bluetooth will steal about half a day, however, as will extended use of the music player. Used sparingly, you could conceivably get through an entire weekend without a charge, but that might be pushing it. It’s best to plan on charging every other night.

As with the LG Vu Plus recently reviewed by Philip, the Sentio uses a resistive touch display. It doesn’t work all that well. Once calibrated, it at least knows “where” you’re pressing, although it may not always know “when” you’re pressing. Its performance was inconsistent at best. It often took multiple presses to get the Sentio’s display to work properly. For the more complicated flicking gestures, it failed completely. The resistive display often couldn’t tell that I was swiping, and instead thought I was pressing. It would launch whatever my finger happened to touch first. This led to a lot of frustration, as I had to cancel tasks and re-navigate to whatever menu or application I was using before the touchscreen screwed up.

The poor touch execution isn’t a total deal-breaker, but it really does get in the way of using the phone.  via: phonescoop

T-Mobile LG Sentio GS505 hands-on picture:

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