Volt White (Virgin Mobile)

Edited 5/6/16 for clarity! My apologies in advance, I'm sure this post jumps around a bit :) I am a phone junkie, and have been since the days of the BlackBerry. I have been with every contract phone carrier over the years, and although I had no horrible issues with any of them, I got tired of the contracts. (Also, when I moved, T-Mobile no longer worked in the house, whoops.) Virgin Mobile was the first non-contract carrier I tried a couple years ago, and it has been nothing short of great. I have no service issues, the bill with tax is under $40 a month, and they have really started to push great-quality phones like the LG Volt and iPhone. I chose the Volt because I already have a work iPhone, and while it has great qualities, the LG Volt has more of what I need for the day-to-day stuff. It is running the latest version of software, and once it's activated, it wasn't loaded with a bunch of bloatware. It runs smoothly, and apps open quickly. You can customize a lot, and I absolutely love the illuminating ring around the home button. My phone is always silent, and I was missing notifications with the iPhone, but this ensures I get every communication I need without fail. You can change its colors for different contacts, which is wonderful. The LG Volt has an 8MP rear camera, and takes pretty nice pictures. Personally, I don't care for the UI, but it does the job and I haven't suffered too much. I wish the shutter would function faster - seems like it takes a second longer than it should with each photo..The front facing camera takes decent pictures, as well - not shaky or super-grainy like the iPhone can be. The call quality is MUCH better than I anticipated. No dropped calls, no tinny sound, and speakerphone is great, too. It helps that the Volt has stereo sound. The number "buttons" and phone portion of the UI are visible and easy to use. The one thing I hope Google updates is the ability to change all volumes at the same time (notifications, sound, etc) - I understand the need for customization, and am happy for it, but there are times I want to change my text/email and call sounds at the same time without having to go into settings. I'm sure it's probably already a feature and just haven't found it, but if it isn't there yet, I will look forward to it in the future. If you're looking for a phone for yourself that's decent quality, or your kids are begging you for something better than a sliding phone, and you don't want to part with $800 for an iPhone, the LG Volt is worth the investment.

What can I say, the price seems to be dropping every week or two. This is easily the best phone I have owned to date. It's fast, simple to use, and the battery life is amazing. I use it to watch videos on the bus, which averages out to about 2 hours of video play, mixed with music and web browsing. Even with all of this, and regular usage for texting, etc. By the time I get home (12 hours later), the battery is still at or above 50%. The gaming performance is fairly good, I ran some 3D games, and it had minimal lag, even with the Unreal Citadel benchmark. The only gripe you'll ever hear about this phone is the screen resolution. Yes, you can see the pixels, but it is not as bad as people might say, I barely notice it. The phone itself is slim, and lightweight. The battery you will notice is a bit larger than most you would see in a phone, but that probably accounts for the longer life. This thing can be used as a universal remote for TVs, pretty cool! I did in fact root it, because I like to have that extra control over my apps and system. A word of advice, if you plan on rooting this phone (which is easy, look up towelroot), DO NOT update the OS directly from the phone, it will break your ability to root it. I had to go through a long process of restoring it back to the previous version, then I was able to root it; it was a real pain. A final thing I will note, though it is very small; there is in fact only one working speaker, although there are two speaker grills on the phone; not the most important feature for me, because I rarely use the speakers for anything music related. All in all, once you get used to it, it is an amazing phone for the price.

I've had this phone for over 6 months now and have found it to be great for the price. It has a couple quirks here and there, but if you can deal with them then it works well. Most of them are software issues, as the hardware has been very solid. A couple in particular are: - For some reason if you try to use anything other than the LG keyboard sometimes it takes a long time for a keyboard to show up, and it keeps asking you for an input method. - The "desktop" can sometimes take awhile to load. - The camera on mine will occasionally stop. It doesn't happen on my wife's phone though (we both have the same phone). Highlights: - Battery just keeps going on this thing. Even with the backlight on for long periods of time it doesn't drain quickly. - Battery charging can be very fast! I think it has a fast charging circuit built in, so if you plug it into a charger that can supply enough current it can go from less than 30% to full charge in less than 2 hours. - Reasonably responsive. Not the fastest phone in the world (would be perfect with more RAM in my opinion), but pretty darn good for the price. - It has a flashlight widget! It seems so simple, but most phones don't include this, forcing you to download some other software that steals your personal info. - The pulldown menu lets you change important settings on the fly, and the included IR remote is pretty good too (if it has support for your devices and you can point it accurately enough). - I get a 4G connection (and sometimes 3G if 4G isn't available) where iPhone users can't even get a connection. - Bluetooth works well for music, and I've even tried out Miracast which works (though seems a bit laggy at times). - Solid construction has survived with no scratches to the screen even when in my pocket every day (with AERO ARMOR) case. Overall I'm happy with this phone, and went so far as to replace my wife's old phone with one of these as well (and she's pretty picky/vocal about how well her phone works).

Rooted it and debloated. Was a little slow so I debloated basically all the LG software and it got me back 200mb of RAM and a little over a gb total in storage space. I actually like the qslide and qremote features but the rest of the LG stuff is trash. The music app and widget are extreme system hogs. Now its lightning fast and I like Kit Kat very much. As a long term Android user it is basically all the stuff I wanted in OS ui terms. I hope they keep it similar and just add features in Android L. Now back to this phone. Good size. The G Glass feels nice compared to my old phones through VM. Im getting used to the power button being on the side and like that the usb is on the bottom. Kinda wish headphone jack was there too. It feels good in your hand and the textured back feels good and provides grip. But when its in your pocket, it still slips and slides. I have noticed that its pretty sensitive as to where you put your hands and signal strength. The bottom left when looking at screen seems to be the place on mine. LTE is finicky in most of Seattle through Sprint. I knew this. However I did get 9/7mbps speeds and 3g does appear to be a little faster and much more reliable over my old AWE most anywhere. I was in the DFW area and had 4g pretty much everywhere once i landed. Now to the feature that I love the most once i got this running smooth. THE BATTERY LIFE IS AMAZING! It was good with bloat. It is amazing debloated and firewalled and tuned via Android Tuner lite. Its great having a big enough screen to watch vids or play most games and not need to drag my tablet with me; along with the benefit of not needing to plug into the bathroom outlet at the airport lol. I got a flight + layover of music via bluetooth and some games and browsing. I left my back-up power supply at home for my mom lol. Didnt need it coming home to Seattle =) Great phone! Just trim it carefully after rooting and youll be impressed. Sprint/VM 4g LTE is ok in Seattle. Fast but thin in coverage. Blows my other smart phones away (Optimus V and Awe). Hopefully we get some good ROMS or Kernels to see what the CPU can do. If you are willing to do a little work, this thing is just about equal to a Moto G, which was my next choice. Get it, gut it, profit. Oh the white is cool too. Was skeptical but it is easy to find =) BUY IT!

There are some things about this phone that I love, and a couple of things that make me want to smash it to pieces. I always buy inexpensive phones and that's why I like LG. I've owned the Optimus, the Optimus Elite, and the Optimus F3. I've owned the Volt for about 3 months. Pros: - Screen size is great - Battery life is amazing. If I don't use it much, it's at 70% when I go to bed. I've had days where I've used it for hours, including a couple drives using GPS, and it's at 15% after a very long day. - Reception is somehow better than other phones. LTE is fantastic, but it picks up 3G a little better than previous phones. I think the voice reception is better as well, but I'm not certain about that. - Screen resolution is adequate. I used to think it was fine, but I recently bought a tablet with great resolution, and that makes me wish my phone was a little better. But for the price, it's good. Besides, I think that lower resolution is part of the reason the battery life is so great. - I love the LED light indicator around the home button Cons: Most of the complaints I read about are true. This phone cannot mulit-task. If I am listening to internet radio and I turn on GPS, internet radio crashes. If I turn on internet radio again, GPS crashes. Same thing happens when I listen to internet radio and surf the web. It happens with both Pandora and iHeartRadio, so I don’t think it is the app. I tried streaming from a website and thought that worked, but then Bluetooth started crashing. Over time, Chrome started crashing more and more even when I wasn’t multitasking. I’ve read comments from others that the keyboard doesn’t pop up when it should. That started happening after a couple of months. It got to the point where the phone was almost unusable. I couldn’t read a paragraph online without the browser crashing. I did a factory reset a couple of days ago and that stopped the browser crashing and the keyboard issue. It did not help the multitasking issue. So I hope it will work again for the next couple of months. Overall, the phone isn’t bad for the price. I am frustrated because it is almost a great phone. I probably would buy it again if I had it to do over, mostly because a phone with this size screen is usually much more expensive.

Pros; Quick, bright crisp screen, no lag. Cons; Camera, force closing apps. I just got this phone today and will later update when i've had it awhile. I've nonstop used this phone today and I must say the battery life wasn't as great as I anticipated. But then again i did just get this phone and have been downloading tons of apps, messing with music, and all sorts of stuff with the brightness all the way up. I'm sure once I'm done downloading and messing around with every single tiny thing, the battery will be just as I expected. I have had a few problems, though. The camera is much, much worse than I expected in low lighting. I am very displeased with the front camera in dim lighting, but the rear camera isn't to bad, especially with flash. In good lighting though they're very nice and take great pictures. Also the camera kept closing on me a few times which resulted me into having to restart my phone. I downloaded a couple kik video apps and the camera wouldn't work until i restarted the phone. I'm not entirely sure if it was the app itself or the phone. And once today it did randomly shut off, but that doesn't make me have any doubts still. At times it takes a minute for your apps to come up after you go to the home screen, but it depends on what you were doing before then. Many, many phones will do that so that shouldn't be much of a concern for anyone. The transition from app to app is incredibly smooth and very nice looking. Lagging is very minimum, basically non existent. Multitasking is very easy and beautifully smooth. Web surfing is a breeze. Oh, the emojis are a big plus! I'm very impressed with how well it keeps up with everything for a midrange phone, very happy I purchased. Everyone who's not WAY into phones, will be be overly impressed with this great phone!😊

I bought this phone 9 months ago after a few years of using iPhones. I wanted to switch to android, because they're cheaper and I'd heard good things about them. I chose this particular phone because of all the great review, but I've been horribly disappointed. I've recently (started a couple of months ago) begun experiencing a lot of "ghost" touches - the phone acts as if it's being touched somewhere even though it isn't. So, if I try to restart my phone, I can't, because the phone thinks it's being touched somewhere else, and it won't recognize me trying to restart it (or use an app or something). Or I'm trying to click a link and instead get sent somewhere random. Another major problem I've had with this phone is the keyboard. It's really, really irritating. The keyboard will only show up about 10 or 20% of the time. Other times, I'll click a box of text and the phone will spend several minutes thinking about showing the keyboard and maybe flash it for half a second, but that's it. I usually have to completely restart my programs for the keyboard to appear and that doesn't always work. This happens most frequently with Chrome and the browser, so I'm usually unable to enter website addresses or Google things. People have raved about the battery for this phone, and I agree that, at first, the battery was very good. However, after a month or two, the battery started to last only a few hours. (And, yes, I've done all of the tricks to clean things up and make the battery last longer. Little to no effect.) For a hundred dollars, I guess this phone is okay, but the keyboard and ghost touches are so irritating, I can't recommend this phone to someone.

If you have gotten this far, you have already read the phone specs so I won't bother listing them off except to echo the sentiments of others and say that this is a really powerful and all around amazing device for the price. Being low\mid end, the devices has a qHD display, meaning it is not full HD. I consider this a bonus. First of, I can't tell it's not full HD. I can read very small, thin fonts with no problem, and watching movies is similarly great. So you can set that worry aside. As for why it's a bonus? The higher the screen res, the faster the battery drains. Considering that this device is coupled with a gigantic 3000 mA battery, the screen res among other hardware factors lends to a phenomenal battery life. Getting at least 2 days out of this phone with moderate usage is not an unreasonable expectation. Not only does the battery last incredibly long, I have never had a phone that will charge from almost nothing to 100% this fast. Unfortunately I have not timed it, but it was one of the biggest and most welcomed surprised this phone gave me. I would also like to mention something some reviews leave out, the antennae. I still have my old phone activated and have been comparing 4g reception. Wherever my old phone reverts to 3g, I still get 4g on the Volt. Wherever I get 4g on both, the Volt slams my old Photon Q LTE in speed. This phone also supports Sprint Snap (next gen LTE) It's pretty rare to find it, but where I do get it in town, I can easily pull 50 down and push 40 up. That's nothing to laugh at. While the Snap rollout has only barely begun, consider your phone future proof in that respect. Also, being an LG, the construction is both elegant and solid as a rock. There is but on downside to this phone, it does not have an HDMI connector and does not support MHL (phone to tv through mini USB). While this is a bummer, there had to be a trade off for everything this phone offers at this price point. This is a fair trade off that I can live with for what is quickly becoming the best smart phone I have ever had. Here's a tip: LG is the most minimal when it comes to piling their own interface on to of Android, but all the same, stock it to be desired. If you install Google Now from the app store and set it as your launcher, it will change to the stock Android interface. I highly recommend doing this first thing.