Beautiful, High-Tech Phone with a Smooth Interface
Written: May 14 '09 (Updated May 14 '09)
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Pros: Display resolution, vibrant colors, smooth touch-screen interface, generous QWERTY keyboard, solid build quality
Cons: Touch-screen lock can be nuisance to some, internal keyboard slightly clicky
The Bottom Line: LG packed an honorable number of features into this phone, and did so with grace and quality. It isn't perfect, but it's a great pleasure to use!
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| deniscit's Full Review: LG VX10000 (8 GB) Cell Phone |
When my Verizon contract came up for renewal, and I became eligible for the new-every-two discount, I started hunting for a phone with a full QWERTY-style keyboard. As texting became my primary means of communication with many of my friends, using the alpha-numeric keypad on my old Motorolla flip-phone became a burden. I mean, who enjoys hitting every key 2-3-4 times just to get one letter out?
First, I wanted to jump on the Blackberry bandwagon and get me the older, but apparently built-like-a-tank, 8703e. Numerous reviewers seemed to indicate that the 8703e will take any amount of abuse and is a fair amount sturdier in build materials than the newer Blackberries, including the Curve. The aspect ratio of a Blackberry keyboard seems perfect for one-hand operation while utilizing the full keyboard. That was until I realized that Verizon has a mandatory data plan for Blackberries that costs a hefty $30/month. I wasn't interested in data usage so much as to spend this amount of money on it. So, the Blackberry idea got scrapped.
LG Voyager seemed like the next best thing "on paper" - full QWERTY keyboard, dual interface with touch external and key-based internal, excellent resolution, a 2 Megapixel camera, and access to email and web without being required to pay a set fee per month. Since the reviews on this phone were overall very positive, combined with the right deal of $29.99 with a 2-yr contract, I decided to get it.
The first thing that strikes you when you power it on is the *gorgeous* screen. Absolutely gorgeous. Vibrant with color (262,000 colors, apparently), bright, and remarkably sharp - much like a nice computer monitor! Oh my, those 400 x 240 pixels make a world of difference compared to my old Motorolla flip phone, where you could actually count the pixels on your fingers. Quality is equally excellent for the external and the internal screens.
Upon startup, the phone lets out a vibe and a clear-sounding melody. Indeed, the phone is very much vibration-friendly and incorporates a "Vibe Touch" technology for its external touch-screen interface, where the phone would produce a short and subtle vibe feedback whenever it registers your touch. This is pleasant when you use the external touch screen, but the feedback technology is also indiscriminant: it lets out a vibe whether you touched empty space on the screen or an actual button that does something. I don't consider this a flaw.
External Interface
So what can you do without having to open your phone? Surprisingly, just about anything. The touch interface is crisp, clean, fast, and efficient. It is actually a whole lot more efficient than what you can do with buttons and arrows, in general. I must praise LG for making the menus as self-explanatory and straight-forward as possible, reducing the amount of learning involved to the minimum.
On the main touch screen, there are 4 touch "hot keys" at the bottom: messages, phone, main menu, and contacts. This is sensible, since you are able to jump directly into messages and contacts without having to go through the main menu. Contacts are alphabetically ordered and shown as a list. Messages are listed in familiar categories: New Message, Inbox, Sent, Drafts, Voicemail, Visual Voicemail, Mobile IM, and Mobile Email. I really only use the first 5, all of which appear on one screen. To see others, you need to scroll.
Scrolling on touch screen is super fun, and I think LG did a great job with that. All you need to do is press - harder than when you tap - somewhere on the screen and drag. Unlike scroll bars on PCs, the screen moves with your finger, in the direction you drag it. The phone is also able to handle fast scrolling, which is useful when searching through your list of text messages, for example. To fast-scroll, you need to imitate spinning a wheel with your finger: you press and drag while accelerating your finger up or down and then let go! The phone will sustain the inertia you've imparted and continue scrolling for 2-3 seconds until you repeat.
When making a call, a touch numeric pad will appear, with a contacts tab at the bottom of the screen to either let you dial or get a number out of your phone book - pretty fast and sleek. When messaging, a letter pad will appear (complete with SHIFT and SPACE keys), which acts in the same manner as the phones without the QWERTY keyboard - about 3 symbols per touchkey, with a tab to switch between number, letter, and symbol modes.
Text messaging from the touch screen is probably as good as any company could ever make it. It still has that annoying several-taps-per-letter layout, but at least the keys are pretty large, the touch screen is precise, and only a gentle tap is needed to register. This makes the usage effortless even if you only have one free hand to hold the phone and text (if I had two hands free, then I'd flip the phone open, naturally). Thinking about it, the 3-letter-per-key layout on the external screen was a smart choice by LG because it keeps the size of the keypad compact while being able to make keys large enough to avoid smear errors.
You can take and view photos on the external screen, as well as edit them. The interface is quite sleek, equipped with a host of semi-transparent menus to tune picture-taking characteristics: light settings, timed delay, color balance, shutter sounds, adjust resolution, etc. After you take your picture, you can perform simple editing, such as cropping, rotation, and zoom. The speed isn't blazing fast here, but I have reasonable expectations, and I think, within reason, the phone performs admirably. Cropping and zoom can be a little trickly to perform if you have large fingers, but I did fine - though wishing I had a stylus pen at my disposal to handle some of those operations when you want better precision.
I also tried some Web Browsing on the touch screen. You can't enter anything via the touch screen and have to defer to the internal keys to do that, but you can browse via pressing links on the touch screen, and you can drag a webpage around by the same scrolling technique described above. Sometimes, you may wish to have a stylus pen if the links and scroll spaces are small - but again, I was able to manage with my fingers.
Aside from the touch screen, the front of the phone has 3 actual hard-wired buttons: SEND, CLR (+ voice activated commands), and END/PWR. These buttons provide valuable shortcuts to quick exit out of menus (END or CLR), as well as dialing directly from your recent call list or dialing directly from a phone number that appears on the screen by direct capture (SEND).
Just so you don't activate any touch-screen functions accidentally in your pocket, the phone has an automatic touch protection, that is activated after probably 15-20 seconds of idle (no-touch) time. This touch protection can be a blessing and a curse. Blessing: your phone won't accidentally dial anyone or erase anything while in your pocket or purse. Curse: the phone will lock touchscreen during calls, so you have to press the unlock button before you can, for example, enter something into an automated phone system. You can unlock the screen by either a touch-screen button if the screen is active (non-powersave) or by a hard-wired slider button on the side of your phone if the screen is off (powersave mode). It can be mildly annoying, but I'd rather the phone not take matters in its own "hands" while in my pocket. How else could one design this?
Internal Interface
When you open up your phone, you are treated to a view of a large screen - same size as your external screen, except in "landscape" instead of "portrait" orientation. The speakers are on the inside of the phone as well. The full QWERTY keyboard is glorious and features generously-sized buttons that are also generously spaced - very important for people with large fingers, like me.
The keyboard looks much like a computer keyboard, with a horizontal one-line numberic line-up atop of the letters. There are 2 SPACE buttons, located on either side of the keyboard (unlike the computer keyboard). The SHIFT button lets you switch between capitalization regimes, as usual, and SYM button lets you use the double-functions of the letter and number keys, which provides quick access to symbols. On the right side of the keyboard, the large square navigation button with 4 arrows resides with a round OK button situated in its middle. The usual SEND, END/PWR, and CLR are also there. There are also two hot keys at the very top, above letters and numbers, to aid in menu navigation and selection. Finally, every key on the keyboard comes alive with a backlight when you open your phone - most keys are backlit in soft green-blueish hue, while special keys and hotkeys are backlit in orange. Soft, tasteful, and pleasing.
The keyboard is a PLEASURE to use. It is spacious and registers keypress perfectly, albeit with a little bit of a clicking noise. In other words, you wouldn't be very stealthy texting on this keyboard during a meeting or a quiet family time. The clicking is probably there to ensure crisp response to user actions, and crisp it is. The key doesn't register unless it clicks, so this is a sort of a feedback. The force you need to apply to press isn't large - just perfectly calibrated - so you can still be real fast without making much effort. Especially CLICKY is that OK button on the square navigation key. That one clicks loudly, but all other keys are more subtle.
Having this marvelous keyboard and the beautiful high-resolution screen made me feel like I used to be a caged bird, stuck in a low-resolution alphanumeric dungeon, finally released!
The one gripe I have is with the general layout of the internal interface of this phone: it's all in "landscape", and I would much prefer "portrait", common to flip-phones. I believe the Blackberry Pearl just came out with a flip-phone, and that is great. Instead of the LG Voyager being like a notebook, I'd rather is featured all the same function but be a flip-phone, with a slightly different aspect ratio, a touch external screen, and portrait-layout keyboard.
The reason I'm wishing for a flip-phone-like portrait layout on the internal interface is because when you only have one hand to text or navigate menus, the horizontally elongated keyboard really makes it near-impossible to text with any sort of speed, and some places are simply unreachable with a thumb of the phone-holding hand. Seriously, it's difficult enough to hold this phone securely with one hand when it's open, let alone try to extend your thumb to fully utilize the wide keyboard!
That aside, if you do have 2 hands for operating the phone when it's open, then the internal interface is absolutely wonderful, and you can get blazingly fast on that sweet keyboard, in which case your right thumb would handle the arrow nagivation key and/or SPACE and your left thumb would handle the SHIFT/SYM buttons - a perfectly fair division of labor, when it comes to texting. In the similar fashion, for the 2-hand operation, having 2 SPACE buttons, one for each thumb, is a smart idea.
The navigation through various menus is easy - same general style you remember from your older phone applies. The only difference is that, due to the phone's internal "landscape" layout, the 2 hot keys for menu navigation are not next to the arrow nagivation key but rather stand-alone. So, you can use them to utilize the options on the left and the right at the bottom of your screen (as before), but when you need to choose a function at the center (such as OK, or SAVE, or SELECT), you have to move to that OK button located elsewhere on the keyboard. A minor design flaw that this is, it could be easily remedied by adding the 3rd hotkey in the middle. Sure, you wouldn't always need it because often pressing OK is associated with scrolling. But sometimes, when scrolling is not involved, it would be nice to have that 3rd hotkey there.
Overall
This is a solidly built phone, and I believe that LG did a wonderful job with this phone overall. Attention to detail is remarkable in all the little nooks and crannies, it is obvious they really gave this phone and its interface a lot of thought. They implemented pleasing screen fonts; sensible yet vibrant color combinations for menus and various information displays that project a positive image; well-thoughtout font sizes; and graphics that help and please without getting in the way.
When you get a phone call, you have the option to answer by either pressing the SEND key or unlocking your touch screen and using the touch key ANSWER. The call screen that pops up has an informative design that uses color to make it quickly readable, with the phone number, contact name (if in your phonebook), and, if you subscribe to CityID, the caller's city and state. When the call ends, you get the usual information screen about how long the call was.
When you get a text, you see a full-screen alert message with contact name/number and an option to read or defer to a later time. One thing I find a bit strange is that if you have multiple new text messages come in, the Voyager won't tell you on the alert screen that, for instance, "you have (3) new messages." My old Motorolla always alerted me to multiple new messages, whereas the Voyager simply displays the alert for the latest text message received. Before I was aware of this, I thought I just got the one text message, where in fact it could be the last one of several. Now, I know and check the Inbox itself to see if I have multiple new messages.
LG made certain that you can go between your external and internal screens with ease, which allows you to combine strengths of the two interfaces. For example, if you're accessing the web and you need to type in an address, you do it with the keyboard, but once you're on the page, you want to navigate by touch - so close your phone and do it! Or, maybe you want to send a text or a picture message: you use the touch interface to quickly get into the text message screen, and then open your phone to use the QWERTY keyboard to type it in quickly and send.
Speaking of the web browsing, I am not paying for a monthly data plan, so I am only a very casual web user through the phone, but I did try it out. The pages seem to take a bit of time to load - depending on the page, it could be 30 seconds to a minute, give or take. But that probably has more to do with the network. I was able to use the webmail interface at my school, even though it was a Sun Java. That was interesting because another Java-based webmail did not open and complained that the browser needs Java. Otherwise, the web browser seemed quite capable and easy to use. You can also select the levels of zoom for browser display, and, if you like, you can use touch screen to navigate the links quickly - especially with a small stylus pen to add precision to link clicking.
Having two separate screens, LG lets you to customize them separately as well. In the wallpaper and banner selection, each screen has its own selection menu. This lets you put one kind of wallpaper on the external screen and a different kind on your internal screen, if you so desire. A thoughtful feature.
Some people gripe that putting the only speakers in the interior of the phone is a flaw. I personally don't use this phone for music or TV, but imagine this could be a valid point. From an engineer's point of view, I can't imagine where they could put full-size external speakers. This does, however, make the ring volume somewhat muted when the phone is closed. So, when I am in noisy places, I choose the loudest ringtone (loud beeps) and put the ringer volume on highest, to make sure I don't miss calls. On the more gentle ringtones, I imagine some people might consider this a flaw. For that purpose, having a tiny diode-sized speaker on the outside would be nice. Yet, this isn't as much as problem as with some Blackberries out there!
The phone has a slot for a charger and for a microSD card, both covered by a piece of flexible plastic that is attached loosely to the phone. To make them easier to remove, LG designed glooves in the body of the phone. Good idea. Some people call these pieces of plastic flimsy, but they are not. They are designed to be loose and get out of your way to the slot, but they won't get lost, and they remain usable and functional forever. My outgoing Motorolla phone used those, and they never broke.
The phone has an enduring battery, though not overly impressive, charges very quickly, and can charge from your PC via a USB cable. Probably due to all the hardware packed into it, the Voyager is fairly heavy, weighing in at 4.7 oz. I don't have a problem with that and actually like its substantial feeling when I hold it in my hand.
The call quality is generally quite good. Sometimes I get a momentary echo of my speech, but that is generally in poor-signal areas, so I doubt the phone is to blame for that. Otherwise, sound quality from landlines is pristine, and in good-signal areas, the cell-to-cell call quality is very good as well.
All in all, I am a happy customer with the purchase of LG Voyager. The gripes that I described above are minor and certainly not enough to make me displeased with this excellent piece of technology. Different people have different levels of expectation for different features, so all I can do is describe my experience and let you make up your mind about why or why not this phone will fit your lifestyle. The phone also has many, many features, and I only described the most basic ones, as well as the general interface and usability in everyday applications. You are welcome to read up on the list of specs for this phone. I think that for the features included with the phone, LG did a terrific job with the Voyager.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 29.99
Recommended for: Adventurous Technophiles - Tough and Durable
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Epinions.com ID:
deniscit
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Member: Denis
Location: Mercer County, NJ, USA
Reviews written: 72
Trusted by: 46 members
About Me:
Being a little different can be a lot of fun!
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