LG's Glimmer, Alltel's flagship fashion phone, brings touch-screen style to the number-five carrier. This is definitely an attractive phone, but usability quirks leave me less than wholly enthusiastic about it.

A gunmetal-gray slider phone with a brushed metal back, the Glimmer is pretty big (4 by 2.05 by 0.59 inches—HWD), and relatively heavy at 4.48 ounces. The front of the handset is dominated by a big 2.8-inch 240-by-400-pixel screen. Slide it up to find a lighted keypad of flat metallic keys that are just a bit too small to accurately press with the pad of your finger. There are lock, volume, and camera buttons on the sides, and a 2-megapixel camera with a weak LED flash on the back.

The Glimmer uses LG's touch-screen interface, very similar to the one on Verizon's VX10000 Voyager and AT&T's Vu CU920. The phone's home screen has five main icons: Main Menu, Phone, Messaging, Contacts, and a configurable Favorites button, which pops up a grid of nine of applications of your choosing. Since the Glimmer has a physical keypad, though, you enter text using the phone keys, not with an on-screen keyboard.

The touch screen is a bit balky. Often, I needed to press extra firmly to get my touch recognized, and occasionally I had to press twice. More recent touch-screen phones such as Sprint's Samsung Instinct have more accurate touch sensors. Also, you can't "swipe" to scroll in many applications; instead, you have to use some slightly awkward virtual cursor keys.

With the physical keyboard popped down, the top half of the phone overhangs the keypad a bit, and the keys are not quite long enough—I kept hitting the key below the one I meant to press. Once I successfully dialed calls, reception was good and the earpiece was loud. The speakerphone volume was a bit lower than I'd prefer, but it was fine indoors or in the car. Audio sounded a bit compressed and speakerphone transmissions were slightly garbled at one point, but there wasn't much background noise.

The Glimmer works with standard 2.5mm wired headsets and both mono and stereo Bluetooth headsets. With our Aliph Jawbone mono headset, voice sounded okay, but there was a bit of pop and crackle at about a 10-foot distance from the phone. Reconnecting the headset to the phone after turning the headset off took two tries. Stereo Bluetooth music performance was marred by hiss, and Alltel's streaming Axcess TV doesn't work over a Bluetooth headset, alas.

The Glimmer has Nuance VoiceSignal speaker-independent voice dialing, which works over Bluetooth headsets as well. The vibrating alert is powerful, and ringtones play at a decent but not very high volume. Battery life was decent for an Alltel phone.

Internet features are weak here. There's just a WAP browser, though Alltel does provide a portal, which reformats Web pages into WAP mode. That's a pity because the 240-by-400-pixel screen offers lots of room to browse. Even more problematic, there's no e-mail client—you can't even buy one from Alltel's store. The Glimmer also doesn't support Celltop, the carrier's neat Internet-widget application that works on less expensive phones.

The Glimmer does feature Alltel's streaming Axcess TV, provided by MobiTV, but performance is disappointing. While programming is smooth and clear and there are dozens of channels, it plays in only half the screen, with the bottom half of the screen taken up by virtual cursor keys. Alltel's TeleNav-based GPS navigation program was also underwhelming. It took a long time to load maps, and it got my location wrong several times. The Glimmer doesn't offer either of Alltel's streaming radio options, Axcess Radio or XM Mobile.

You can store files in the Glimmer's 37MB of on-board memory, or preferably on a microSD memory card up to 4GB. The microSD slot is under the back cover, however, where you can't get at it without removing the battery.

The Glimmer's 2-megapixel camera captured clear, well-balanced, average-resolution photos in daylight. Low-light photos tended to blur if I didn't hold the camera completely still. The video camera took decent 320-by-240 videos at 15 frames per second. The Glimmer's music player, meanwhile, worked fine with AAC, MP3, and WMA music files dragged and dropped onto a microSD card.

The Glimmer works as an EV-DO Rev 0 modem for a PC with the appropriate service plan, but you have to track down the drivers and cables yourself. (Drivers and cables for Verizon's VX8500, VX8600 or VX8700 will work.)

In Alltel's lineup, the LG Glimmer stands up against the much-less-expensive Motorola ROKR Z6m—basically the same phone, but without a touch screen—and the more expensive Motorola RAZR2 V9m. We haven't tested the Alltel ROKR, but we've reviewed the impeccable V9m for Sprint and Motorola Z6c and Z6tv. The Z6 models aren't anywhere near as cute or fun as the Glimmer, and the Glimmer has a better camera. But the Motorola phones are less quirky and more functional than this fashion model.

Benchmark Test Results
Continuous talk time: 4 hours 41 minutes

Compare the LG Glimmer AX830 with several other mobile phones side by side.

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