I’ve been using my new LG VX8100 cell phone for about 2 weeks now. Overall I’m satisfied.

Couple of things:

1) Paid the $4.99 for Mobile 2.0 (I like to check my email via yahoo and news feeds when I’m out of town or away from a computer). It’s $4.99 unlimited bandwidth (unlike Cingular who reams you at .03 cents/kilobyte). However, it does subtract from your minutes, so I only use after 9pm and weekends.

2) “IN” Calling is GREAT!! I just wish there was a feature in the addressbook to mark a contact as having Verizon. You can check if your friends are “IN”.

3) Making a call out of the addressbook is kind of difficult at first (too many buttons). However, you can set speed dials (and voice activated dialing, although I haven’t tried this yet).

4) Camera has great resolution (default is 640×480 but can be changed to 1280×960), does have a 3 second delay, which can make for some odd/blury shots. I’ve found it’s hit or miss, not sure what the difference is, but some pictures are sharp resolutions, others are really grainy. Seen the same for both indoor and outdoor shots. Possibly lighting, or that 3 second delay if I move it or something.

The 15 second video recorder is pretty good too. I mean, well let’s face it, as far as video goes it sucks, but it’s better than what I expected for a cell phone, or even my digital sony camera’s 10 second video recorder.

5) MP3 player is disabled, I read there was a way to enable it and set mp3s as your ringer, although it required connecting your phone to your pc (to run 3rd party software) and renaming the file. Verizon’s reasoning is that they will soon release an iTunes-like download on demand service, and will enable the mp3 player in the newer revisions of the phone operating system, once their service is ready.

6) battery life is good, as long as you don’t use the video recorder or camera excessively. I disabled the EVDO searching, which also will consume battery life. I don’t plan on using their highspeed broadband (EVDO) anytime soon, so no reason to have it search for it.

To do this, hit the “Menu” key, then type “0″ once, then “0″ 5 more times. You then get into their secret service menu. Choose “Network Select” then “Mode Preference” and select “1x only”. Get It Now, Web and phone will still work.

7) All the “Get it Now” stuff costs money. They have “demo versions” which only let you browse the apps/music/ringtones. To actually Play something, you need to buy it. Probably the most profitable pricing scheme they could come up with. I did buy the $8.99 for “7 uses” on a ring tone downloader. So far, I’ve only found 3 ringtones which I like. And they are only polyphonic ringtones too, no MP3 ringtones yet.

The best features of this phone are the speaker phone, camera, video recorder (easy 1 button access for those hard-to-catch scenes).

Call clarity is fine. I did read that itwas poor. I personally haven’t experienced this, except with a hands-free headset. I haven’t tried it with a bluetooth $60, or at least a newer headphone w/mic piece.

It does have a mini secure digital card slot, which today comes up to 1gb of storage. Will be pretty cool to store my mp3s on it in the future.

You can download the LG VX8100 manuals. (LG’s web site is virtually useless).

For me, it was either the Motorola E815 or the LG VX8100. I looked at the mtorola in person, and people were right - it feels like a cheap piece of plastic (the Dell of cell phones). That alone was enough for me to buy the sturdier LG VX8100 (all the sales people said LG was better too).

The one difference from what I gathered was the Motorola had a working MP3 player.

As for price, I bought mine on LetsTalk.com after rebates the phone was free (+tax). You do have to wait 4 months to send in the $150 rebate though. LetsTalk was able to handle my number porting without any problem. When the phone arrived in the mail, all I had to do was punch in a number and activate it. (You enter your portable phone number AFTER your billing info, fyi).