1) Front View

Here is the Spectrum and its 4.5 inches of touch-screen real estate. Note the three Android control buttons under the LG logo. From left to right, there is a settings button, the home button and a back button. They’re not virtual, but they lie under the Gorilla Glass. As a consequence, you often need to tap the buttons multiple times to get a response.

The back is interesting, a sort of off-black color piece of plastic with a textured appearance, but no actual texture for easy gripping. In fact, the phone is quite slick to the touch, a puzzling move on LG’s part. There’s also the 8-megapixel camera, which sports auto-focus, face detection, exposure control and geo-tagging. There is a 1.3-megapixel camera for video chatting in front.

The device weighs just under 5 ounces, and measures 5.33 inches long, 2.71 inches wide and only 0.41 inches thin.

Once we powered the device on, we saw some of the familiar Gingerbread look, with the weather widget on one of the seven home screens. Yet LG has definitely customized Gingerbread to its liking. Gingerbread is the OS now, but this phone will get the bump to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich later this year.

Users may, of course, customize the widgets. LG offers several widget options.

Over on the Spectrum’s media home screen, you get options of accessing videos, photos, music and more in an attractive, picturesque package.

The social media home screen lets users associate their Facebook, Twitter and MySpace (yes, MySpace) accounts with the handset.

Another home screen lets users customize weather, news feeds, stock tickers, calendar and rich notes.

One thing LG did that was unique for Android handsets was to partition its preloaded app selections into categories, as you can see here.

For example, the phone lists apps for media, news and search, tools, communications, and video.

We checked out ESPN in HD. The application is decent and makes for an interesting inclusion by LG. Perhaps the phone was designed by a sports fan?

The Spectrum includes Netflix, which is becoming a standard on Android handsets with large screens.

We loaded up Sesame Street and got an appreciation for this phone’s 16:9 aspect ratio and 329 pixels per inch.