Design, Features, and Performance Network
Using a two-tone plastic body and familiar silhouette, viewing awards such as a miniature Nexus 5 $ 379.95 at Amazon. It is compact by today's standards by 5.02 by 2.67 by 0.42 inches (HWD) and 4.9 ounces, making it easy to use with one hand. Feeling like no space is wasted on the back of solid, matte plastic exterior, unlike what might be expected from a second $ 100 designs.
The 4.5-inch, 800-by-480-pixel LCD IP is not particularly pointed at 207ppi, but color reproduction is vibrant and contrast is good. There is some color shift when viewed off-angle and the screen can not stand to be bright for outdoor use, but all in all, belies this display aggressive price point of recognition.
In Boost, Sprint CDMA supports the recognition of (800/1900 / 2000MHz) and Tri-band Spark LTE (850/1900 / 2500MHz) network. Getting an LTE phone cheap is a steal, but remember that Sprint's LTE coverage is among the lowest for a major carrier. Call quality is good in my tests, with decent volume in the earpiece and clear transmissions through the mic. Pumping up the volume earpiece made some undesirable distortion, however, and the noise cancellation struggled to drown out a particularly strong city streets.
Rounding out the options the 802.11b / g / n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, and GPS. Wi-Fi is limited to the 2.4GHz frequency, which means it will not be able to connect to faster 5GHz network.
Performance and Android
Fitted with near-ubiquitous Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC 400, clocked at 1.2GHz with 1GB of RAM, the LG tribute performing inline with the whole host of phones in entry-level and midrange flooding the US market today. Overall performance of the system is reliably agile smooth animations and fast app launching. I hardly noticed any level, that's a real feat for a phone-like device priced phone with other carriers to run closer to $ 300 mark unsubsidized.
The awards will be running Android 4.4.2 on LG Optimus UI on top, which is immediately familiar to any recent LG convert. Most repairs are visual, with extra settings quickly discarded the notification shade. I was pleasantly surprised to find KnockOn double-tap to wake motion worked awards. You can also assign functions to the Volume Up key, just launch the camera from sleep with a long press. No QSlide multitasking, however, but that's understandable given the real estate of your screen and low-end specs.
One big issue: With 4GB of internal storage, only 1.4GB is available to users outside of the box. Boost adds a fair amount of bloatware here, but many of them are removable. Unfortunately, you are not stuck in some apps, such as particularly irksome Lumen Toolbar app that manages to find its way into every phone carrier. Not enough storage would be an issue if you want to install many apps or even just a small number of resource-heavy title. There is a microSD card under the back cover, which worked fine on my 64GB card.
On a battery rundown test, where we stream a YouTube video over LTE, 2,100mAh battery's recognition is good for 6 hours, 13 minutes.