Verizon Wireless offers a simple, effective update to the popular LG enV. Is this the best compact QWERTY phone yet? Find out in our LG enV3 review.
Review summary of the LG enV3:
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 Of all the compact QWERTY phone designs (check them out here), we like the LG enV model the best, with its small but useful external screen and its roomy internal keyboard and display. The phone was a bit thick and chunky but it was so comfortable to use, with large keys inside and out, that we hardly noticed its size. The new LG enV3 is even better than its predecessors, with its ability to download and sync corporate e-mail and contacts, its improved call quality and multimedia experience, especially in video. It isn't perfect, as the Web browser and the 3-megapixel camera left us disappointed, but there are more advanced phones for those features. The messaging apps could also use an update to bring SMS into the modern age, but overall this is a very likeable phone, and easy to recommend to folks who want a compact texting machine with a few clever extras onboard. Release: June 2009. Price: $80.
Pros: Simple, elegant design with a great internal screen and keyboard. Improved in every way over predecessor, especially in call quality and corporate e-mail features.
Cons: Messaging apps could use some polish. Web browsing and camera disappointing. Small external screen good, but could be much cooler.
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Full LG enV3 Review:
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Design – Very Good
The LG enV3 is a compact messaging phone with a hidden QWERTY keyboard. Open up the thick, stubby little clamshell sideways to reveal the full QWERTY within. Aesthetically, it's almost unchanged from the LG enV2, but we liked the design on that phone, and the few minor tweaks LG has made only refine the good work they've done here. The phone has 2 LCDs: a nice, 2.6-inch screen on the inside, and a less impressive, blocky-looking, 1.6-inch display on the exterior.
The external screen is just large enough for some basic functions. You can make calls and search your address book, control music playback and browse your library, or even send text messages. The external menu is limited, but LG wisely added a Bluetooth shortcut so you can pair quickly without opening the hood. Clearly, all the really good stuff is inside, but the phone is still very useful while closed. The number pad is huge, which makes for very easy dialing. Still, we'd like to see LG try something cool with that little external window. How about a super-sharp OLED display, or go the other way and try some e-ink for simple dialing and text? As it is, the external screen shows a serious screen door effect, with jagged lines and blocky text. If it were more unique, we might forget how small it was.
On the inside, the LG enV3 really shines. The keyboard is small, but still quite comfortable. The QVGA display looks very good, and it's flanked by a pair of loud stereo speakers. The internal screen gets a different menu, and though at first we were dismayed to find a standard Verizon Wireless setup, in fact about half of the main menus icons can be swapped out and rearranged. This helped us bring our favorite features, like Web browsing and the Corporate E-mail app, to the top level. It's still a basic, no-frills design, but it was useful for accessing features quickly.
Calling – Very Good
Call quality on our LG enV3 review unit was impressive, especially considering the hard time we had with it's predecessor, the enV2. Calls still sounded a little distant, with a digitized hiss under our callers' voices, but overall this hardly bothered us, and we enjoyed making calls with this phone. Reception was pretty good, but not the best we've seen. We usually had 3-4 bars of fast, EV-DO service, and an extra bar of 1xRTT cell service. Battery life was also adequate, though not much improved since the last generation. We got about 5.5 hours of talk time out of a single charge, which is on par with LG's estimates.
For contacts, we were fortunate to have an Exchange account, because the phone does a nice job synchronizing contacts with a Microsoft Exchange server. We'd like to see more sync options for this phone, though, especially more options to grab contacts from an online service, like Yahoo or Gmail. Still, once our address book was loaded, finding the right number was a cinch. We could simply type the name into the Home screen, and the phone automatically jumped to the contact list and started searching. It wasn't the most intelligent search, more like jumping to the right letter rather than gathering up the matching results, but it still helped.
For calling features, the LG enV3 is nicely loaded. The phone gets Visual Voicemail from Verizon Wireless, joining the growing ranks of phones with this option. Verizon's visual voicemail app looks great. We wish it weren't its own app, as we grew impatient having to open it every time, but once open, it was quite useful. The phone also uses speaker-independent voice dialing. In our tests, this worked about 90% of the time, though once or twice it was a little off the mark. Conference calling was very easy, just press the Send button to join two calls. Finally, the speakerphone was nice and loud, the way we like it, thanks to the dual-speakers around the screen. Closed, it was much more muffled, but the phone was very useful simply placed open on a table for freehanded conversations.
Messaging – Very Good
The LG enV3 comes with a nice list of messaging features, though none of these were much to look at. Unfortunately, plain old SMS messaging was the most disappointing app on the phone, though we suspect it will see the most use. We were impressed that the phone could search our address book while we typed names into the recipient field, but for actual messaging, the phone was a bit dumb. It wasn't smart enough to capitalize a letter after a period. There were also no auto-complete or correction features. Finally, we like to see threaded messaging on diehard texting phones, but the LG enV3 only displays messages individually, and not as part of a whole conversation.
The keyboard on the LG enV3 is great. Typing was a breeze on the large keys, and each key had plenty of room in between. We wish the CLR key, which acts as a backspace, was grouped with the rest of the keys, so rewriting and erasing was a bit awkward, but we like that LG moved the spacebar to the center of the keyboard on this phone. Inside the clamshell, there are shortcut keys for calling Favorites, as well as a new message key for sending texts. You can also activate the speakerphone or voice dialing features with the included shortcut keys.
Multimedia - Good
Multimedia on the LG enV3 was nothing terribly special, and was helped along by some powerful speakers and a simple, attractive music player. The phone has access to Verizon Wireless V Cast Music Store, and we downloaded a couple tracks, but most of our music we sideloaded directly onto our microSD card. The phone had no trouble reading our DRM-free MP3 tracks from Amazon, and even displayed our album artwork. On the external screen, music playback is simple, with just a few controls and access to the library and playlists. On the big screen, the music player looks neat and modern. Artwork looks crisp, and we like the simple selection preset EQ settings to beef up the bass or spoken word performances.
We had some trouble downloading videos over the V Cast Video Store. The store gave us a variety of errors until we finally gave up. Fortunately, the LG enV3 did a nice job playing our own homegrown videos. It couldn't shrink down movies too large for the QVGA display, but once we cut down our mp4 video files to 320 by 240 pixels, they played smoothly and looked great on the phone's screen. Playback options were few and far between, but for simple movie watching, the enV3 makes a nice little tool, and works well sitting casually open on our desk.
Web browsing - Good
The LG enV3 gets a scaled-down version of the Obigo Web browser we found on the high-end LG enV Touch. Regrettably, the enV3 doesn't get Flash Lite support, and the browser seems much more like a simple WAP browser than a full HTML browser. You can't enter URLs directly into the browser, you have to use a Verizon Wireless WAP page for that. To access our bookmarks, we also had to jump to a separate VZW Web page, then click the appropriate links. Worst of all, Web pages loaded on the phone looked pretty lousy. Our own homepage was a complete mess, with layout problems and jumbled pictures spread everywhere.
Camera - Mediocre
The camera on the LG enV3 may have gotten a resolution boost to 3-megapixels, but we're still not impressed with the images we got from this phone. Serious cameraphone fans would be better served by the LG enV Touch, which uses a basic touch focus option and produced slightly better results. The enV3 had trouble with focusing, and would often aim at the background, leaving our foreground subject blurry. There were plenty of settings and shooting modes available to help, but the enV3 just couldn't nail the basics.
We did like that the phone was smart enough to offer a dual display mode for the camera. With the clamshell open, you can use the internal screen as a large viewfinder, or the external screen as a self portrait aid. The phone is also capable of shooting video at QVGA resolution, though these tended to look watery and pixilated, and not at all impressive. Check out our image samples below for the best shots we took in our test period.
Self Portrait
Landscape and lighting trouble
Wildflowers out of focus
Flowers and Wood
GPS navigation – Very Good
For turn-by-turn directions, the LG enV3 uses VZ Navigator. Though directions on the phone worked very well, we found the Navigator app to be just a bit buggy. The newest version of VZ Navigator includes voice recognition, but everytime we tried to speak to the search tool, it would listen carefully, then do nothing. When we manually entered our search terms, everything worked smoothly, and our actual turn-by-turn navigation session went well. The phone found us quickly and had no trouble tracking us. Though you can't initiate a navigation session with the phone closed, once you've started your trip, you can shut the clamshell and the enV3 will display tell you how long before you have to turn right or left, and give you the street name.
Odds and ends
Our LG enV3 review unit was a bit buggy during our test period, more than we usually expect. Many apps on the phone, like visual voicemail and corporate e-mail, don't come preloaded, you have to download them from a dedicated link. We had trouble downloading the voicemail app at first, and during our initial e-mail setup we encountered some errors. The V Cast Video store never seemed to work right for us. Television commercials for the LG enV3 got us excited about a dedicated Twitter app, but we couldn't find it anywhere. We tried the "Browse and Download" and "Extras" menus, which both offer to "Get New Applications," but when we tried to download new apps, we simply got an empty menu with nothing available.
Price and availability
The LG enV3 is available now from Verizon Wireless for $80 with a contract agreement and applicable discounts and rebates.
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