LG 620GIt was close to two years ago that I decided to switch my cell provider to Straight Talk. They offered cheap service, cheap phones, and I was working for Walmart (parent company of Straight Talk) at the time, so it seemed like a logical choice. I’ve had a great experience with their service and the company in general, but this review isn’t about that. The first phone I decided to pick up was the LG 620G slider phone. I mainly bought it because it was inexpensive compared to the other phones ($70 at that time, about $30 now).

I’m not going to cover the specifications of this phone in any kind of detail, because there’s really nothing about this phone that sets it apart from others in the price range. If you want a full list of detailed specifications, refer to this page. I’ll mention ahead of time though that this phone does NOT have a headphone jack, even though that spec page says it does. It also says it has an FM radio, which requires the headset to work. I have no idea where you get this “headset” or what kind of connection it uses, so I was never able to use the FM radio.

So I’ll give you what I didn’t like about the phone first. Close to two years later (today), I’ve gone through three of them. The phone isn’t really a bad one (I’ll get to that), but moving parts (the slider) are the bane of all things electronic. The first one I got lasted me a bit over a year. The first symptoms of failure were the screen occasionally going 100% white when slid open/shut. This is caused by the ribbon cable between the screen and the body of the phone wearing out. The usual fix was “smack it until it works”, but even that didn’t work all the time. This was really annoying, and the warranty was expired by this time. I figured it wasn’t a big deal to pick up a new one, expecially since the price had dropped to $30 by this time. The second one I got lasted about 6 months, and the same symptoms started showing. White screen, distorted colors, etc. when it was slid open, except this time it couldn’t be fixed by smacking it. That meant I couldn’t use texts, the web, know who was calling, or anything. This one was still under warranty, so I got Straight Talk to replace it for free. The annoying this about this was that I had to send the phone to them before they would send me a new one. So, I re-activated my old (still broken) LG620G and used it for about 2 weeks before the new phone arrived. This recent replacement still works, but that’s probably because I got a different phone and stopped using it.

I had another annoying problem with 2/3 of these phones. It would seem that the space between the LCD panel and the plastic front is a magnet for dust. There were these little white specks of dust that got under the screen within a few days of having the phone, and the only place I kept it was in my pocket. The dust wasn’t a huge problem unless you tried to look at the phone in sunlight, where it was very reflective and made most things on the screen impossible to read.

That all probably sounds terrible, but there is some good to this phone. First off, it’s $30. That’s super cheap, and if you’re looking for a very simple phone that will do all of the essential cell-phone things (call, text, web), it’s a good buy. It’s also pretty durable, save for the whole slider issue. I’ve dropped it on concrete numerous times from 4+ feet, and it continued working like a champ. The internet connection you get with this phone is half decent too. As long as you’re browsing mobile web pages, they load pretty quickly. I would regularly use it to browse Facebook/Twitter, though if you’re going to do this I recommend downloading Opera Mini as the native browser is slower and renders pages poorly. The battery life is pretty good, with regular use I could go 3-4 days without needing to charge it. I had next to no service issues with this phone. I can only think of two places off the top of my head that I didn’t get any signal. It would drop calls occasionally, but not so often that it was a problem.

My overall opinion is this: the LG 620G is… a phone. It’s not an exceptionally bad phone, but it’s certainly not going to amaze you. If you need a phone that works well and is cheap as dirt, this one will probably suit you well.