LG Rumor 2 Launched for Sprint

LG’s long rumored Rumor 2 has finally launched exclusively on Sprint, bringing with it a slide-out QWERTY keypad, QVGA display, 1.3 megapixel camera, a removable backplate and your choice of Black Titanium and Vibrant Blue shells. The LG Rumor2 has an easy-to-use design with a vibrant display and a spacious keyboard. It offers solid call quality and extensive e-mail and messaging support.
The Rumor2′s design is based on its predecessor, and when placed side-by-side, the two phones resemble one another. Both have an elongated candy bar shape with the smooth lines and rounded corners. And of course, the front face slides to the left to expose the full keyboard. But even as it shows many similarities, the Rumor2 also shows a few differences from the original Rumor. It’s available in only one color (basic black), and its skin is a little glossier. It also has a more vivid display and is slightly bigger (4.4 inches tall by 2.1 inches wide by 0.7 inch deep) and heavier (4.2 ounces).
The Rumor2′s phone book holds 600 contacts, with room in each entry for six phone numbers, an e-mail address, an instant-message handle, a URL, and notes. You can also choose to hide the contacts with a pass code. The Rumor2 supports caller groups and photo caller ID. You also can pair contacts with one of 33 polyphonic ringtones. It’s not a smartphone, but the Rumor 2 is designed to excel at text messaging, e-mail, and IM. Sprint’s messaging phones handle e-mail better than any of the other carriers’, thanks to Sprint’s excellent Seven e-mail program, which pushes most consumer e-mail accounts to your phone and can sync e-mail with Microsoft Exchange.
The Rumor2 has some nice messaging options. The phone gets a threaded style of SMS. That means that it groups your SMS conversation with a specific contact into a single window, and it looks more like an IM chat.
The interface is mostly intuitive. Basic navigation was pretty easy, though it took too many clicks to access a folder other than our in-box. You can choose how many messages you’d like to appear in your in-box–from the 25 most recent to the 100 most recent–and you can select how much of the message you’d like to show in the in-box. Swapping between accounts was pretty simple. Ideally, we’d like all of our messages to come to single in-box, but that’s something we can live without on a handset that’s not a true smartphone.