The LG800 Trac Phone is a “semi-smartphone” witha touch screen based interface. Because LG eliminated the need for a key pad orkeyboard in the LG800, they were able to make phone very compact, at 10x5.5x1cm. The LG 800 has a screen 7cm diagonally, about 60% of the phone’s frontface.

A good thing about making thismodel mainly use a touch screen is its dimensions. When other phones have physicalbuttons for number pads/keyboards, they are either on the front face of thephone, or hidden under a sliding or folding component. Phones with number padson the front usually have very small screens, where phones with number padsand/or keyboards that are hidden away are thicker, because they require anextra layer to place the buttons on. Small phones can be conveniently stored inpockets, but the size does affect visibility a lot.

The LG800’s screen feels comparatively large despite being only 60% of the front surface, as it takes up most of the space. The only other things on the front are the speaker, tiny microphone, company logo, and the buttons for “Send,” “Back,” and “End.” The screen is nicely sized, but some of the text onscreen is small, so I would recommend moving the logo to somewhere else, like the back, in order to allow for more screen space. The reasons LG most likely had for the placement of their logo was probably because the center right below the screen is where the logo is most visible to the user, and less screen probably allowed them to make the phone cheaper. It does make the front look slightly more interesting while the screen is off.

The main screen interface is set up a bit like those of other smart phones. It has nine spaces for application shortcuts that are largely sized, and a tool bar at the bottom for important functions, such as calling, list of contacts, texting, and a button leading to a menu for more apps. In order to make the nine icons big enough to push, LG compensated by making the status line for signal, messages, sound setting,battery and time very tiny. It is not easy to read any of the text displayed on the main screen because of the small font size. In between the icons and the tool bar, there is also a line of text that scrolls across the bottom right above the toolbar. It says the amount of minutes left, and was placed there for convenience, but the placement ended up making it more inconvenient. Often the scrolling starts with the minutes right next to the area where the scrolling disappears, so I have to wait a few seconds just to see how many minutes I have left, and read it quickly. There is a lot of unnecessary text in this line, so I suggest removing the “Home” label and placing the amounts of minutes and service days on two separate lines in a stack to eliminate any scrolling.

Texting is one of the main forms ofcommunicating with cell phones now, and the touch screen has had variouseffects on how to type on the phone. The phone has included three differentmethods of text input instead of just using a number pad, which is veryconvenient, because texting letters using a number pad is not instinctive atall, and it is easy to get timing wrong, as in hitting the key too few/manytimes and not getting the letter you wanted to input. Problems are also causedby not hitting the key enough times quickly enough, and then phones think youare starting a new letter when you actually wanted the letter next in thesequence. Say someone wants to send a text, but his fingers are not agile,maybe he has arthritis. Then chances are very high that the phone will skiponto the next letter input before he can get the letter he wanted. For peoplewho have trouble using this method to text, the phone has two more modes thatmay suit the phone’s user.

There is an option to switch to astandard qwerty keyboard that is displayed horizontally. This is the fastestmethod of typing for me, but the screen is not very responsive, so often whiletyping, I end up omitting several letters or hitting the wrong ones entirely.Even though many people are familiar with keyboards from frequent computerusage, not everyone knows where the keys for each letter are, as it doesn’thave any apparent order that is easily understood. To compensate for peopleunfamiliar with both the key pad letter format and the qwerty keyboard, thelast method is a handwriting mode. Handwriting identification software doesn’tseem to be fully capable of recognizing writing in every style, particularly ifthe input is messy. Writing with a finger is not something I do everyday, so myinputs are not neat at all, and the handwriting mode often misreads whatletters I try to write. I think they should take only one letter at a time,because sometimes I try to write one letter, and it gives me two or threeseparate ones. For example, I tried writing ‘d’ and it read it as ‘cl’ instead.‘d’ can look like ‘cl’, but it was not what I had intended at all. This mightnot work for everyone, because some people might try to write entire words at atime, because writing one letter at a time and waiting for the phone toregister it is a very slow process.