Tracfone LG 410g Review

Read this Tracfone LG 410g cell phone review to find out one flaw that may make this a loser for you. This phone has some great features, is fun to use, and, in some ways, raises the bar for basic prepaid cell phones. It also taught me something about using Tracfone and Net10 phones that I didn’t know before, but it also freezes up in one particular situation.

When it Freezes

Update

This problem seems to have gone away for now.

While this phone comes with a few wallpaper images, it does not handle images that well. In particular, if you send a picture message to this phone from another phone, it will receive that message, but when you try to read the message, the phone will freeze and you will have to turn it off and back on to be able to use it again.

When you go back to the messages later on, this freezing behavior does seems to go away, though you still can't see the picture.

This is a pain, because though you may not care whether you can receive picture messages, it would be a pain to go around telling your friends not to send you these messages because your phone can’t handle it. (The Samsung T105g, another basic Tracfone, also doesn’t receive picture messages, but those messages simply don’t arrive.)

For now, I would recommend getting the current versions: the LG 440g.

Other than this, the LG 410g is a pretty good phone and you can read the rest to find out more:

Pretty Good Phone

The LG 410g is an improvement in its appearance, functionality and ease of use over previous flip-style Tracfones. While this is still a basic prepaid flip phone. What this phone does do, it mostly does pretty well.

Coverage and Rates

The LG 410g is a GSM phone so uses either the AT&T or T-Mobile network.

Rates - Not a Double Minutes Phone

One issue is that this is NOT a double minutes or triple minutes phone, so a 60 minute airtime card is worth just 60 minutes rather than 120 as with a double minutes phone or 180 with a triple minutes phone. If you do decide to make the Tracfone LG 410g your primary cell phone, I recommend purchasing the double minute conversion card for $20 or the one-year double minute card with includes the conversion feature. This one-time investment will end up saving you money.

Physical Features

The LG 410g is a compact, lightweight phone that is comfortable to hold with a keyboard with separate, comfortably-spaced, easy-to-press buttons. This helps eliminate dialing errors.

Small Screen

This phone has a colorful but small screen that’s actually fine for just about everything except surfing the web. When dialing, the digits are displayed in a nice large font size. The numbers are not as big as on a Jittterbug phone, but still pretty good.

There is a monochrome external screen that shows the Date and Time and also indicates whether the phone is set to ring or vibrate and whether the alarm clock has been set.

Charger

Even though the instructions say to charge the phone for five hours before first using it, just about one hour was needed to fully charge this phone. The talk time is up to 4 hours and the standby time is up to 7 days, which is a little low but okay as long as you remember to charge your phone.

Using the LG 410g

Ringtones & Graphics

The Tracfone LG 410g comes with 13 “polyphonic” ringtones and a 5 wall-paper style graphics.

Mobile Web

There is mobile web capability. This is not full web access, but you do get access to the search engines such as Google, MSN Mobile and Yahoo mobile. Once you do a search you can click through to the results. When you start the web browser, 0.5 minutes are deducted immediately, and then it goes according to the time you spend. So, to do one search on google, for example, and to click through and quickly read one search result used up about two minutes of airtime.

500-entry Phonebook

The 500 entry phonebook should be plenty for most people, but you will have to enter the contacts in manually.

Tools

Alarm Clock

The alarm clock is actually a useful feature, too, and it’s easy to set. You simply pick the time and enter the memo so you know what it’s reminding you of. The standard alarm tone sounds is a high-pitched bell tone. There’s even a snooze button which gives you an extra five minutes, but you do have to flip open the phone to access it (the side buttons don’t affect the alarm).

Voice Recorder

You can record notes and reminders of up to 30 seconds in length using the voice recorder. That’s a little short, however, on the plus side, the sound is clear. The recording is stored as a .amr file, and you can set it to be your ringtone as well.

Calculator

It’s got a useful calculator with basic arithmetic functions as well as also trig functions like sine, cosine, as well as things like square root and natural log.etc. So it can be handy for doing your homework or going shopping.

Manual

Access the Tracfone LG 410g Manual(pdf) here.