For better and for worse, this is not an iPhone clone from Verizon Wireless. Find out what went so wrong, in our in-depth LG Dare review.
Review summary of the LG Dare VX9700:
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 This is what we worry about the most when we hear of a new all-touch phone, that the screen and interface won't be able to keep up or respond properly to user input. With no buttons to fall back on, the LG Dare can be very difficult to use, due to the way it handles touch input. It's too bad, because some features, like the camera and the fast Web browser, deserve to be part of a great all-round package. Clearly a lot of effort went into the interface design. It's unique, intuitive and very customizable. It looks great and the polish extends deep into the phone's menu structure, making the entire package feel modern. Unfortunately, serious hardware flaws stymie the designer's efforts, and where the phone should shine, it's more frustrating than fun. Release: June 2008. Price: $130.
Pros: Good camera. Very fast networking. Unique, customizable interface design.
Cons: Serious responsiveness issues make almost every feature much more difficult to use.
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Full LG Dare VX9700 Review:
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Design - Mediocre
The LG Dare is an all-touch phone, meaning it has no hardware keypad for dialing or typing. Phones that forgo the keypad all rest on one attribute: the responsiveness of their touchscreens. Unfortunately, the LG Dare has some serious issues, and perhaps even some design mistakes, that make the touchscreen very difficult to use. The problem lies in scrolling, a common action on touchscreen phones. On the Apple iPhone, scrolling is a breeze, and it is easy to scroll through long lists by literally jogging with your fingers. On the LG Dare, when you touch the screen to move a list up or down, the phone usually registers this as a tap, so the moment you let go, you've actually selected an option that you wanted to skip. This made every aspect of the phone more difficult and, for features that had shorter lists, like the address book, it was nearly impossible to access the menu options hidden beyond view. This wasn't a singular flaw, but a design problem that affected our entire experience with the Dare.
It's really too bad, because there were many features on this phone that were not only good, but superlative. The interface was very clean and clever, with a nice, polished feel to it and a smooth look. The screen itself is very bright and colorful, with a 240 by 400 pixel resolution that puts it just above the average multimedia phone. The menus are not only well-organized, but they are also fairly customizable. You can adapt the "Shortcuts" menu as you see fit, and even the main menu screen has icons that you can drag and position however you like. It should all come together to make a great phone, but serious issues with the reponsiveness of the screen hold everything back.
Calling - Mediocre
Call quality on the LG Dare was very good. We got some underlying static during conversations, but voices sounded accurate and callers were easy to hear. Reception on the Dare was better than most Verizon Wireless phones we test. Our office seems to be in a Verizon dead zone and we usually only get a bar or two, but the Dare showed 3-4 bars consistently. Speaker-independent voice recognition wasn't perfect, but it worked a majority of the time without incident. Unfortunately, the rest of the calling features came up short.
Besides our trouble with the address book, the LG Dare makes some strange choices on the dialing screen. While you are in a call, the screen has buttons for messaging, contacts and even note-taking, but nothing to make conference calling or call-waiting any easier. Why not a "join" or "swap" key? The speakerphone was also far too quiet for our tastes. We had no trouble in our office, but the minute we stepped into the din of downtown Manhattan, the speaker was completely lost.
Messaging - Mediocre
Along with our scrolling issues, we weren't too fond of the onscreen keyboards on the LG Dare. That's keyboards, plural, because the Dare automatically switches from a numeric 12-key pad to a full QWERTY when you turn the device to the left. Not when you turn to the right; the music player can figure out clockwise vs. counter-clockwise, but for some reason the keyboard cannot. Either way, we had sensitivity problems with the keyboard that caused errors in almost every long word we tried typing. As we would lift our fingers, what ever keys we grazed over would register as a tap. This made messaging difficult, but not impossible.
If only the LG Dare had some tricks up its sleeve. We mis-type on the Apple iPhone all the time, but the phone has amazing auto-correct capabilities, so our recipients hardly notice. The LG Dare doesn't auto-correct. It doesn't even know that the next letter after a period should be capitalized, and even our aging Palm Treo knows that. And, for a phone that causes so many typing errors, we wished deleting words were easier, but it was a long, slow process involving many taps on the screen.
Otherwise, the phone supports instant messaging for AOL, Yahoo and MSN using pretty much the same client we see on every V Cast phone. E-mail is available, as well, and SMS and MMS were both easy to use, besides the whole typing part.
Multimedia - Good
The best part about the LG Dare's music capabilities is the fact that it uses a standard 3.5mm headphone jack. Otherwise, the scrolling list issue comes up again in a big way in the music player. Even more egregious than scrolling the long lists, though, was the Dare's horrible copy of Apple's excellent CoverFlow interface. When you tilt the Dare to the side, you get what appears to be a lineup of other albums, but flicking right and left merely selected the next or previous track. So, instead of a wide view of your albums, you basically get to choose between three tracks.
The LG Dare synchronized with Windows Media Player as an MTP device with mixed results. None of our album artwork came through, though the covers appeared in WMP, and the process was very slow. The music player itself didn't bring much to the party. We liked the wide range of preset EQ options, but we prefer more playback control, like the ability to scrub our way through a music track by moving our finger across the progress bar. We also would have liked a way to cut the music quickly, should the need arise. On our iPhone, we can just pull our the headphones, but that's a no-no on the Dare, which starts playing your tunes over the admittedly soft speaker. Jump to the Home screen and you'll get to see what track is playing, but you can't actually pause the music from there. You have to jump again into the music player and hit the pause button for that.
Video playback was a better experience than music playing, but only because the screen on the LG Dare looks so good. We loaded some videos from our desktop, since the V Cast music videos can be pretty low quality, and we liked what we saw. Videos moved smoothly and looked bright and colorful.
Navigation - Good
Our criticisms with the LG Dare's GPS navigation have more to do with the VZ Navigator software than with the Dare's hardware. The GPS sensor on the Dare found us very quickly every time, even buried in the concrete jungle of New York City. Once we had our destination set, though, VZ Navigator became a confusing mess. We wondered why it didn't correct itself when we went off course, then realized we were not on the "Follow Me" map, but rather some other map that looks exactly the same. Even then, by the time we were a block off course walking to our destination, instead of auto-correcting our route the phone simply gave up and declared we had reached our destination, even though it was a couple blocks away and not within sight.
Camera - Good
The LG Dare has one of the best cameras we've seen on a camera phone. It's as good, if not better than any of the Nokia Nseries phones, like the Nokia N78. That still doesn't mean it's as good as a real point-and-shoot, and we saw some problems with image quality, like serious fringing around the edges of objects and some strangely colored halos that appeared at the edges of buildings where they touched the sky. Colors looked pretty good, and under the best lighting conditions the images were perfectly acceptable. But even the best cameraphones have a ways to go before they truly replace digital cameras.
For camera features, the LG Dare comes loaded. It uses a Schneider-Kreuznach branded lens and a 3.2-megapixel sensor. You also get auto focus with face detection, which seemed to work just fine. Panorama stitching was very impressive in this phone, even better than on some of the full-fledged cameras we've tested. One strange design choice: the shutter release actually releases the shutter when you release the shutter release. So, it doesn't take the picture until you take your finger off the button. We've never seen this on a camera, and we think the act of removing our finger caused the camera to move just enough to spoil our framing.
Web browser - Mediocre
Running on Verizon Wireless' EV-DO Rev. A network, the LG Dare has one of the fastest Web browsers we've seen on any phone. Pages literally sprang open and even our image-rich homepage loaded in mere seconds. It was truly impressive, but of course the Web browsing experience was spoiled by the unresponsive screen, as well as some minor layout issues. Pages just didn't come through correctly, though all the elements were there. Usually, a few lines of text were out of place and overlapping with nearby images. Worst of all, scrolling through Web pages was very difficult. You cannot simply flick a page upwards and expect it to keep moving. You have to keep scrolling with your finger, and every time you happen to land on a link, you have to deal with the browser incorrectly thinking you've clicked on it.
Laptop sidekick - Very good
With it's EV-DO Rev. A coverage, the LG Dare makes an excellent tethered modem. We had no problems installing the VZ Access software and drivers for the phone, and using the tethered modem software was a breeze. Our phone wasn't set up for tethered modem support, but if it's as good as other Rev. A phone's we've tested, like the HTC Mogul on Sprint, we would expect some impressive download speeds. We also like that the phone uses the new microUSB standard, which should cut down on cable clutter on the road. Tethered modem support would give the LG Dare a leg up over its CDMA competitor, the Samsung Instinct, also on Sprint, but that phone's interface is so much better and more responsive that we could hardly recommend the former over the latter.
Price and availability
The LG Dare is available now from Verizon Wireless for $130 with a contract agreement.
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