Is the Ally really that bad?

[ohmrsh]

I've been considering getting an LG Ally, but I'm having a hard time deciding if this phone is any good.

I know that most people who come to forums only come to complain, or only post when they have an issue. So I just have to ask...how good is this phone?

Is it worth getting? I'll be switching from a Moto Devour that has reboot and force close issues on basic android processes (i.e. trying to type in a web address)

What are some pros of the device?

 

[gndmepyon]

The keyboard is awesome. Both my wife and I have the Ally and have no issues with them. They are a really solid phone. 1 thing you should be aware of, it doesn't look like the Ally will be getting any OS upgrades.

 

[ohmrsh]

I'm not concerned about that. The Moto Devour only has 1.6, not to mention no autofocus on the camera. As long as 2.1 on the Ally works, then it's okay with me. I just need something that works like it is supposed to.

 

[gndmepyon]

Ya. It works great. My wife is not "technically inclined" in any way shape or form. She has no issues getting the phone to do what she wants it to. My 8yr old daughter has even managed to find and download a couple games on each of our phones. I've never had either phone lock up or freeze. The camera is decent. Nothing amazing. The slide out kb is the best of any kb on an Android device. The touchscreen is responsive and accurate. The battery life is quite reasonable if you remember to season that battery properly. If you are into Social Networking the Socialite app works great as long as you don't let it sync contacts.

 

[Outlaw.99]

I traded in my soon to be discontinued Devour to get the Ally.... I like it... Socialite is still a tad buggy, but its being worked on and a patch is due soon...

 

[ohmrsh]

Ya. It works great. My wife is not "technically inclined" in any way shape or form. She has no issues getting the phone to do what she wants it to. My 8yr old daughter has even managed to find and download a couple games on each of our phones. I've never had either phone lock up or freeze. The camera is decent. Nothing amazing. The slide out kb is the best of any kb on an Android device. The touchscreen is responsive and accurate. The battery life is quite reasonable if you remember to season that battery properly. If you are into Social Networking the Socialite app works great as long as you don't let it sync contacts.

I don't think the camera can be worse than what I have now. No autofocus..no flash. Have you tried out the panorama shoot mode yet? I read about it on the LG site.

 

[gndmepyon]

I have not. The camera is the most underused feature on my personal phone.

 

[bamaredwingsfan]

I did a quadrant benchmark today,and the ally only scored about a 480 something. Now keep in mind that my wifes phone is rooted, and i removed a few apps as well. Maybe someone soon will come up with a few over clock kernals soon, so we can bump up the speed a bit. Really suprised me when i seen the results of the benchmark, i was expecting somewhere in the 6 or 7 hundreds. My droid hits about a 1300 something on the average, so i guess i was over expecting the ally to perform better than possible.

 

[seanpdixon]

I've been considering getting an LG Ally, but I'm having a hard time deciding if this phone is any good.

I know that most people who come to forums only come to complain, or only post when they have an issue. So I just have to ask...how good is this phone?

Is it worth getting? I'll be switching from a Moto Devour that has reboot and force close issues on basic android processes (i.e. trying to type in a web address)

What are some pros of the device?

keyboard is great. the physical size is nice. almost identical to a EnV touch. Overall though, too many issues for me. In my opinion though it is worth the $50

 

[bisbers]

The not-technically-inclined GF as well as her sister both seem to like their Ally's. She's complained of a few small force-close or reboot issues, but nothing that sounds out of the ordinary for android (unfortunately).
If you want an android phone with a kb on vzw, its either this or the motoDroid, which may as well not have a kb. Anyway, I'll agree with the poster above, worth the $50.

 

[marcus531]

In my opinion, the Ally is great-with-some-limitations ...
but I am NOT an average user and am biased by my job requirements.

Pros:
+1: Keyboard ... beats everything ... especially for unix/sysadmin complex typing needs or any time you may have alot of numbers to enter.

Specifically, the MotoDroid put command-keys at the bottom, sacrificing ease-of-entry for all the numbers and symbols (numbers are on qwertyuiop, symbols are not in !@#$% order because they moved some for convenience).

Also, the keyboard has a proper feel to it and you can type much faster on the Ally keyboard than on the MotoDroid (My wife has the MotoDroid and I typed extensively on it before deciding to wait months using my old Treo hoping (blindly) that something with a less slippery/squishy keyboard than the MotoDroid would come along.

(Temporary downside: The Ally keyboard is missing a few keys \ | ` for unix commands ... so I just rebuilt an Ally-specific mod of ConnectBot with a few stanzas of extra code to remap those keys directly (and make volUp/volDn change 'screen' windows and moved font-size to alt-volUp/Dn) and problem solved ... just waiting a few more days to hear back from the ConnectBot original developers before I post the download (not market) link here).

Conversely the Ally can run / use SWYPE ... it is fantastic, and I use it for many day-to-day activities ... but if you are just using swype, then you are not the kind of user who NEEDS a keyboarded Ally and should get a Droid-X instead.

Note that swype doesn't like odd fragments or slang ... I can't swype "config" or "skymap" for example, but I can swype "conf". (You can always one-key-at-a-time type in swype though)

+2: Screen: 7% smaller than the MotoDroid in resolution, 15% smaller in raw size, and in looking at both NOT side-by-side, I really can't see a difference. In going to the same website (my company's firewall demo), I lost 2/3 of one icon off the right side of the graphical control display ... and the MotoDroid couldn't display the entire screen width either (MD lost one icon, Ally lost 1+2/3 icons, so both has to scroll a smidgen).

The Ally screen is noticibly brighter than the MotoDroid (tested across multiple MotoDroids on maximum brightness (auto=off) vs my Ally on max brightness).

+3: Camera: Even at Ally=3.2 vs MotoDroid=5 mp, the Ally camera slightly beats the MotoDroid for image quality :
* both at maximum res/quality,
* took identical pictures of the same scene with both but kept my feet planted between pics, no zoom or scene modes
* viewed in the gallery at maximum zoom, the Ally images could resolve slightly finer details than the MotoDroid images, which looked like someone has raised the JPEG compression level too high (the MD should have beaten the Ally easily at 5 vs 3.2)

Note that I'm rather unusual in that I have taken hundreds of pictures with my Ally, generally in batches of 25-75ish at a time, recording EVERY screen of a prototype firewall's BIOS/CMOS settings screens before and after BIOS upgrades for my employer. (After the first batch and its moved-too-soon blurry screwups, I now LOVE auto-review mode being set permanently on and also have the loudest / clearest camera sound turned on (I'm often doing this in a server farm with thousands of computer blower-fans near me)). I'm building a tripod mount for my Ally this weekend out of a spare ebayed $6 Ally armored case, a metal clip, one tripod-sized nut and epoxy

The Ally camera interface is simply substantially superior ...

For one thing, on the MotoDroid, when you change any settings, it puts you back to the main camera display, the Ally stays in the settings screen so you can tour the menus easily.

Also, the Ally has a properly worded and clear help screen for the camera modes with an explanation of what things mean (like "smile mode" and "beauty mode").

Camera modes and menus: (any menu I did not list is the same)
(except the image-size, where the 5mp size on the MD is misleading on quality)
MotoDroid: Scene modes: Auto, Action, Portrait, Landscape, Night, Night Portrait, Theatre, Beach, Snow, Sunset, Steady Photo
MotoDroid: Color Effect: mono, sepai, negative, solarize, red tint, green tint, blue tint
MotoDroid: ISO, Timer, shot-mode, review, sounds, grid menus all missing

LG-Ally: Scene modes: Off, Portrait, Landscape, Sports, Night, Sunset
LG-Ally: Color Effect: mono, negative, solarize, sepia, posterize, whiteboard, blackboard, aqua
LG-Ally: Timer: 3sec, 5sec, 10sec
LG-Ally: ISO: Auto, 100, 200, 400, 800
LG-Ally: Shot mode: Smile shot, Beauty shot, frame shot, panorama shot
LG-Ally: Auto-review mode
LG-Ally: Shutter sounds: off, 1, 2, 3, 4
LG-Ally: Grid view: off, 2x2 grid, 3x3 grid

About smile-mode ... it identifies heads and waits until visible heads are smiling.

About beauty-mode: automatically removed spots and imperfections from faces, making faces appear bright and clear.

+4: LG Home: 4-spot bottom-icon dock with 5 home screens ... I've never needed to go hunt for a home-screen replacement once I found the next 2 features of the LG-Home app drawer:

LG Home has 8 user-renameable (but not movable) categories + 2 not-renamable categories at the bottom (APPLICATIONS and DOWNLOADS (where downloaded apps are put initially (yay, I don't have to remember what I've downloaded for try-this-out (I have partial anterograde amnesia, I can't remember even from a few minutes ago a simple list of things like exited-reaction-to-neat-app))))

AND user-movable icons within the categories of the app-drawer, so you can arbitrarily place anything in any order in any of the 8+2 categories

AND (less important but nice) a delete mode graphically within the app-drawer ... so while the App drawer is open, menu->uninstall ... all the icons stay right where they were, but the uninstallable ones (not locked in by LG / Verizon) now have a red-circled-X marker on their icons ... click on an icon and it shows you the application and data sizes and you can uninstall it with OK

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Cons:
-1: Processor 3D capabilities: I don't know what else I can't see on the Android Market, but I do know I can't see Google Earth, even though I can see Google Sky Map. Apparently there are things about the LG-Ally using a cheaper version of its processor that gave it raw speed but no 3D acceleration so certain things that _require_ that will fail.

3D graphics games can work (I tried a 3D car racing game (raging Thunder) just to see if it would work and it does (I'm just terrible at it) ... so apparently calculated graphics work ok but graphics that ONLY use 3D acceleration fail. Perhaps an older version of Google earth might work for the Ally, but I have no room to install it because ...

-2: Memory ... painfully too small for installation-storage space if you are as crazy as I am about adding apps.

This is/will-be theoretically fixable via already-done rooting (but this is not for technophobe-type people ... there is not yet a one-click-installation-done method)

Also, the RAM level means things get killed off annoyingly often (i.e., the browser I had with 8 tabs open if one or more of those goes to a code-bloated site like msnbc or foxnews.

-3: USB port cover ... I truly despise the cover and am not quite sure why I haven't amputated it yet ... I leave it open a huge % of the time because I keep mine plugged in alot because I am constantly on pandora to bluetooth headphones, ssh sessions, speaking my text messages via drive-safe.ly (and my record is over 1000 robot-sent server-problem messages in a day, although that was before the Ally)

-4: The Ally came with a 4GB card instead of 16GB (I picked up a 16GB micro-SD-card for about $30 via pricewatch.com pointing to 16GB microSDHC (Secure Digital High Capacity) Card Sandisk SDSDQ-016G (CLC-S) SD Class 2 8 pin flash memory for your mobile device pda ipod mp3 player or digital camera: OEMPCworld.com ... note that this card is a 2MB/sec card, and the card that came with the Ally is a 4MB/sec card)

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I don't play high-performance games or do other things where I care about the processor speed, and I have yet to try to play movies off of the SD card ... If you care about multimedia and fast games, consider a multimedia fast-processor system like the Droid-X.

Also, if you can, try SWYPE on a friend's Droid-x or other Android device, you may decide you don't need a physical keyboard ... a co-worker got the MotoDroid and now never opens the physical keyboard since I got him to start using swype.

 

[Eris Lover]

Sure would be nice if I could find an Ally friendly version of swype