 This is David with The Verge and this is the LG Spectrum. It's a new $199 Verizon phone, but we've seen two phones like it before. There's the Optimus LTE in Europe and the Nitro HD also on AT&T. And this is just a variant of both of those phones. It has the same 720p IPS display, which is really great. It's got super accurate colors and it's really bright and just looks really good. It's one of the best features of the phone. There's a 1.5 GHz processor inside along with a gig of RAM and 4 GB of internal storage. The phone in general works really well. It's really snappy. Everything happens pretty much instantly. There's the occasional delay when you hit the home button or you're swiping between home screens, but that's pretty normal for any Android phone and it's certainly not worse here than anywhere else. One of the things LG is promoting about the Spectrum is its integration with the ESPN ScoreCenter app. The app is available for all Android phones, but it comes preloaded on the Spectrum and for the first time it will actually stream 720p videos. You can get highlights and game footage and all kinds of stuff all in 720p. It actually looks really good. I don't know if you'd buy a phone based on it, but it's a really nice feature to have for sports fans. Other than the screen, its connectivity to Verizon's LTE network is probably the phone's best feature. It's super fast and works really well. It's not quite as good as what we got on the Nitro where we got up to 60 megabits of download speed, but it works really quickly and really fast. We got about 17 to 18 megabits download speed on Verizon's LTE, and it's a much more widespread network. So that's the good stuff, but unfortunately there's a fair amount of things we didn't love about the Spectrum. The primary thing is the software. It has the same UI skin as the Nitro, and LG just kind of unnecessarily customized basically everything about the phone. The app drawer is by default broken up into these kind of nebulous categories, and it makes it really hard to find anything you want. Or if you put it, you can make it a list, and it orders things difficult, and it's just hard to scroll through and find what you're looking for, especially since there's a lot of bloatware, you'll do a lot of scrolling to try and find any app that you're looking for on the phone. There's also, it's got this blue on blue color scheme that just doesn't look very good, and it doesn't really hurt the performance of the phone, but it just kind of makes it ugly. The browser performance, fortunately, is actually really good. LG didn't do much to customize the look of it, but it actually works really well. Holding it next to a Galaxy Nexus, say, it actually scrolls a little smoother, and even the small text is easy to read because of the really good display. The other big problem is just the build quality of the phone. It looks a lot like the Nitro HD or the Optimus LTE, but it's built a little differently. Instead of the super textured back that some of the other phones have, it's got this really glossy back, which is one, really prone to fingerprints, and two, just looks and feels really bad in the hand. It feels kind of slimy and slippery, and it's just hard to hold on to. I was constantly wiping my hands on my pants because I feel like I was sweating, but the phone is just not nice to hold. It's also got all of its ports and jacks crammed up at the top. It's got the same super breakable piece of plastic up at the top that you should just snap off as soon as you buy the phone. It's also got three passive Android buttons instead of four. They combined the search and menu buttons into one, so if you long press, you get search, and if you press it short, you get menu. It's also got, for some reason, this funny silver border around the home button, which makes it look like a physical button, even though it isn't. It's just kind of an odd look and almost makes the phone look like it's a knockoff of an actual Android phone. In general, it works like you'd expect any Android phone to. Its call quality is pretty solid. It's actually better than the Nitro or the Optimus LTE, but the one problem is with the speaker phone, and the speaker's not that loud anyway, and it's also on the back, the speaker's placed kind of right where you want to put your hand, so you just can't hear when you're holding the phone on speaker phone, but if you move it away, the speaker phone works fine if a little quiet. There are two cameras on the Spectrum. There's an 8-megapixel camera on the back and a 1.3-megapixel one on the front, and the front is exactly what you'd expect. It's fine for video chat, but not much else. The back is good, too. It has a nice tap-to-focus feature like some of the Samsung and Motorola phones we've seen, and it's also really fast. It focuses and takes shots much quicker than a lot of smartphones out there. It also shoots 1080p and 720p video, which is, again, pretty fast. Overall, the Spectrum's a lot like the Nitro HD, which we gave a good score in spite of its bad software because it was a really well-built phone, but unfortunately, on Verizon, LTE and a 720p display don't really set you apart, and the poor build quality and the bad software, again, just don't make the Spectrum a particularly appealing device, especially when there's the DroidRazr or the HTC Resound or the Galaxy Nexus all available. There's just no real reason to buy the Spectrum, even at $199.