Verizon ends the Voyager and goes for broke with two 3-inch high-res displays. A smartphone alternative? Find out in our LG enV Touch review.
Review summary of the LG enV Touch:
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 The LG enV Touch is certainly a superior device compared to the LG Voyager, even though the new phone lacks V Cast Mobile TV. Instead, the enV Touch gets 2 high-resolution displays (hint: one's still better than the other), a slew of multimedia and messaging features, and enough power to show off those big displays with fancy video playback and Web browsing with Flash Lite. We'd have liked to see some new ideas from Verizon Wireless for this phone to give it advanced access to the online social networking services that are most popular with this phone's potential audience. Still, if you're looking for something different, a solid phone all around with a great screen (or two), the LG enV Touch gets the job done nicely. Release: June 2009. Price: $100.
Pros: Great, hi-res, colorful internal display. Nice mix of multimedia, messaging and calling features. Great keyboard.
Cons: External screen doesn't compare to internal screen. Touch interface wasn't reliable or responsive. Menus were discombobulated, at times basic.
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Full LG enV Touch Review:
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Design – Good
The LG enV Touch is a beefy clamshell phone with a large, 3-inch external touch screen and a similar 3-inch display on the inside. It opens sideways, and the extra width makes room for a full QWERTY keyboard within. The two displays really steal the show, but there's a marked difference between them. The interior screen is not a touch screen, and it's also a much darker, richer looking display. The external display had a plastic feel to it. It was somewhat dimmer, and it was disappointingly unresponsive during our tests. There was a noticeable screen door effect. Still, it was hard not to be impressed by the 800 by 480 pixel resolution on both displays.
Regardless of some wonky touch response, LG has once again tried to beef up Verizon Wireless' interface design, like they did on the LG Voyager. There's a pull-out drawer for favorite apps and even media file and Web browser shortcuts. There are pop-up menus and pull-down menus and menus that slide from side to side. There's no real rhyme or reason to it, and the interface lacks the class of LG's upscale S-Class interface design we've seen recently. Certainly it brings the best apps forward, with some room for customization, but the lack of touch response and the strange organization make the whole experience seem a bit more adventurous than you might wish for.
On the inside, the LG enV Touch really shines with a jumbo keyboard and an even better display. The menus aren't quite as exciting since you can't touch them, but almost every feature other than calling is improved by opening the clamshell. Beyond the QWERTY keys, we liked the roomy 4-way button on the right side that was placed right for gaming, as the shortcuts for jumping to our favorite contacts, or writing a new message. Users who are going to keep the LG enV Touch open most of the time will probably be the most satisfied with the design.
Calling – Very Good
For calling, our LG enV Touch review unit did an admirable job. This wasn't just due to the phone's call quality. Calls sounded pretty good on this phone, but not spectacular. We heard some digital muffling on our end, and callers reported a similar quality on their side. Still, this didn't hamper our conversation, and at least the phone had solid reception. We always held onto 4 bars of 1xRTT service and 3-4 bars of the faster EV-DO network. For battery life, we saw a slight improvement over the last generation, closer to 5 hours of battery life for a long conversation, but we did keep the screens turned down for most of our chatting. We imagine with these high-resolution screens, longer multimedia use will drain the battery much more quickly.
We synchronized our contacts with our corporate Exchange server using the included Corporate E-mail app, and this gave us our full contact list on the phone. The contact list is much more manageable on the LG enV Touch, and we like the new Favorites menu that even provides some cute little silhouette icons for contacts who lack their own picture.
Otherwise, the phone gets all of our favorite calling features, sometimes to excess. We found 2 voice dialing apps on the phone, accessible from different shortcuts, and each required a slightly different syntax. A strange inconsistency, but 2 is certainly better than none. Conference calling was very easy to accomplish with the onscreen buttons that pop up during a call. In all, the dialing screens on the exterior touchscreen were very good. Some of the buttons could have been more useful during calls, but the LG enV Touch provided helpful shortcuts and easy calling options.
Messaging and Keyboard– Very Good
Verizon Wireless hasn't done much to update some of the aging messaging apps we see on all their messaging phones, but we do welcome the addition of the Corporate E-mail app, as it adds some enhanced functionality across the board for business users. None of the messaging apps look pretty, but they are all sturdy, simple versions of their respective features. There is SMS messaging, and though it doesn't quite offer threaded messaging, it does group messages together in a nice looking way. The Corporate E-mail app didn't offer advanced functions, but it did give us access to our Exchange Inbox, as well as data for the contact list and calendar. Mobile E-mail didn't have Gmail on its list of preset e-mail services, but it had no trouble downloading settings when we gave up our basic info. All in all a satisfying experience for the basic necessities, but nothing really special. As phones like the Palm Pre and some of HTC's devices offer advanced access to Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, it's time for these high-end messaging phones to embrace similar advanced access to these services, since this is what the audience craves.
The internal QWERTY keyboard on the LG enV Touch is nice and wide. The keys are discrete, nicely raised and rounded with a soft click to them. We're not a fan of splitting the bottom row with the spacebar, and there seems to be enough room to perhaps squeeze in an additional row, but we're not really complaining, because this keyboard was comfy as is. We were happy to find that, for the most part, the LG enV Touch is smart about opening and closing the clamshell for text entry. Opening and closing doesn't always automatically quit an app like it does on some other clamshell QWERTY phones. You can almost always open for text entry then close when you're done. We recommend this, as the touchscreen keyboard is pretty lousy. There are landscape and numeric versions, but the screen was so unresponsive, we found the touch keys frustrating. Some times, we would get a haptic vibration, an audible click and a visual cue that we had pressed the correct key, but nothing would happen, or the wrong letter would appear. Stick to the real keys, they're a much better experience.
Multimedia – Very Good
As a music player, the LG enV Touch is okay, but nothing special. It managed to chew through all of our tracks, and the music player app itself was adequate. Even the touchscreen version was easy to handle, no need to open the phone this time. Tilt the phone on its side and you get a cover flow album spread, then you can zoom through your album covers using the arrows on screen. You can synchronize the phone with Windows Media Player or even Rhapsody subscription accounts, but we simply dropped MP3 tracks into the music folder on our microSD card. Once we got the folder name correct, the phone found them. The LG enV Touch also gets access to the V Cast Music store, but there was nothing special to report about this experience. It's still slow, expensive and surprisingly wide in scope.
The video experience on the LG enV Touch was surprisingly good. We've been let down recently by high resolution phones when it comes to video playback. The LG enV Touch couldn't quite live up to its full resolution potential, none of our 800 by 480 pixel videos would play properly on the phone, but the enV Touch handled VGA mp4 videos very nicely. Movie clips looked sharp and colorful, especially on the superior internal screen. Even stretched to fit the wider display, our videos looked great.
We wish the LG enV Touch had some better multimedia hardware on board. For one thing, with its tilted screen and flanking speakers, the enV Touch cries out for some serious loudspeaker sound, but instead it gets a pair of piddly little mobile speakers. There is a 3.5mm headphone jack, and of course the music sounded much better playing through our own cans. The phone can handle memory cards up to 16GB, but the device is large enough that surely LG could have slipped in a few GB of onboard storage? Perhaps in the space they saved by not including a mobile TV antenna?
Web browsing - Good
The Web browser on the LG enV Touch is a bit ambitious for such an ultimately simple browser. The Obigo browser uses a touchable interface on the exterior screen, and it worked fairly well with fingertips. There were even some convenient zooming and resizing buttons on screen, a nice touch. Unfortunately, zoom couldn't help the poor layout ability and sub-par rendering. Our own page came out a bit jumbled, and so did a few other sites we tried. CNN wouldn't load it's normal homepage, only the mobile version.
We were pleasantly surprised to find some Flash Lite support on the LG enV Touch. The phone was able to play YouTube videos directly in the Web page window. Videos didn't look great, the framerates were certainly low, but they never crashed the browser and the few videos we tried all loaded without arguing or failing. The Web browser was fairly quick overall, and most pages loaded in a hurry, but at its best, we wished for some Wi-Fi support to go along with the 3G network.
Navigation – Very Good
The LG enV Touch uses VZ Navigator for turn by turn directions, and it gets a fairly advanced version of the navigation app. The phone found us quickly during our navigated route and it had no trouble tracking us through turns. When we got too far off course, it would simply give up and ask us to start over, but it loaded new directions quickly. There were also a slew of nice point-of-interest features to find movie times and local attractions. The app even worked well on the exterior touch screen, with large controls, but of course the maps looked better on the better interior display.
Camera - Good
Considering the features and specs on paper, we were hoping for better pictures from the 3.2-megapixel camera on the LG enV Touch. The phone offers a touch focus option, and we had fun trying to get this to work, but in the end most of our subjects were slightly blurry. Center focus was a little better, but under bright lighting the images were apt to overexpose. Panorama was fun to use, and the camera did a nice job stitching these together without an obvious seam.
Purple flower, slight off focus
Self Portrait
Wildflower, centered, good light
Puffball, too much light
Flowers and wood, subject too small to catch
Panorama, interesting lighting
Video recording on the LG enV Touch was pretty good. The phone can record VGA resolution videos. These were 3ivX-encoded, .3g2 files, an unusual but usable format. They didn't look superb, videos wavered a bit, but looked better than on most average camraphones. The phone also has a fun photo browser. It's a vertically spinning wheel of photos, and it reminded us of the wheel contestants spin to get onto the showcase showdown on "The Price is Right."
Price and availability
The LG enV Touch is available now from Verizon Wireless for $100 with a contract agreement and online discount.
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