LG Lucid Review

By Rob Boggan

Oh LG, how we love thee. It’s been such a long time since we’ve seen a truly original LG design. Most LG phones appear really bland, or as direct copies of other powerhouse handsets. Totally not the case with the LG Lucid. Rocking an extremely gorgeous design with high end features and a mid-range price point, the Lucid seems poised to take a pretty decent stand within the Verizon Wireless smartphone lineup.

For starters, the LG Lucid has quite possibly one of the most elegant designs I’ve seen, not only from LG but from any manufacturer in quite a while. From the front the phone looks pretty sub standard, with the user being greeted by a simple black border around a 4 inch display. Where the action really lies is on the rear cover and the sides of the phone. The battery cover is a black cherry color, made from an attractive high gloss plastic material. Looks great but it’s definitely a huge fingerprint and scratch magnet, as I found out after a few days with it. The sides of the phone look pretty smooth as well. Sporting a machined metal look, with the power button on the right hand side of the phone, along with another button on the left that serves as a design enhancer and nothing more.

The LG Lucid is marketed as a “bargain” LTE phone, and the hardware that the phone rocks fully supports that sentiment. Sporting a 4 inch 800×460 LCD display, the Lucid’s touch screen looks and feels like one from 2 years ago. Text on web pages appears jagged and pixelated, and colors don’t seem as deep as most other displays. This doesn’t mean that the phone is unusable, rather think of it as going from using an iPhone 4 into an iPhone 3G. The cameras were another piece of the phone’s hardware that left me wanting for more. The main 5MP camera on back took average photos which were not bad, but far from being good. Most photos we shot with the Lucid appeared pretty decent, but most shots had a bit of a washed out look to them, and the focus worked pretty sparingly. Video recording worked pretty solid especially when shooting in 1080p resolution.

With support for Verizon’s LTE 4G network, the LG Lucid ran through the interwebs with blazing fast speeds. Thanks to a dual core 1.2 GHz processor, the Lucid ran through most tasks without so much as a hiccup, which is huge for those who’ll actually use this phone a ton. While the Lucid only rocks a 1,700 mAh battery, we found that battery life was pretty solid within the Lucid. We could power through a full 10 hour day of usage (tweets, facebook, google+, light phone calls) with relative ease even while connected to LTE the entire time. Call quality was about average, with me having not dropped a call the entire time I used the Lucid. Audio quality was a bit questionable, as I did experience a few slight crackles and voice distortion.

The LG Lucid definitely fits into it’s own little niche, and should absolutely do well based on it’s price alone. While most of the high end hardware specs (screen quality and camera) were a bit below par, all in all the Lucid is a solid device and is extremely usable. If high end is your thing, you may want to drop the extra $20 and spring for an iPhone 4, but if you want a solid LTE device that won’t break the bank, looks like the Lucid is your huckleberry.