LG Fathom Review

 
LG has outed the Fathom (aka VS750) with little fanfare. Featuring a mercifully unadorned WinMo 6.5.3 (save for wallpaper, pictured above, designed by a certain Vera Wang), a 1GHz CPU, quad band GSM, and a handful of AC adapters for charging all over Europe and the UK, this is a device clearly meant to go global. But will it capture people's hearts and minds? Read on to find out.

This is not a light phone -- a quick, unscientific survey of what we happen to have in our desk here finds that even the G1 feels like a feather compared to it. Sure, we don't mind (we like a phone with some heft, after all) but you might balk at its, well, bulk. As far as the slider mechanism goes, it's solid, with the landscape QWERTY keyboard moving into place with a healthy click, revealing the twenty-six letters of the alphabet plus your full compliment of function keys as well as a d-pad.

Moving in, the 3.2-inch WVGA display does the job admirably -- colors are, well, their proper color, sufficiently bright and bold, and it's only upon very close inspection that things start to get wiggy. Close reading on a very long train ride might give you a headache, but quickly jotting some emails you should be fine.

All in all, we have to say that LG is on the mark with its first Verizon smartphone (even if it's a rather boring mark). Of course, with the entire world (or at least a certain specialist segment that we cater to) counting down to Windows Phone 7, and with amazing things coming from the Android community every day, the whole WinMo thing feels a bit like a throwback. And at $150 (with $100 rebate and two year contract) we think the companies are hitting a little high. Still, this is a solid outing and a solid device -- let's hope that it's the first of many for the pair.