Check out our Verizon Wireless Blitz review, where we slide open the large, full-QWERTY keyboard and wonder where things went wrong.
Review summary of the Verizon Wireless Blitz:
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 The Verizon Wireless Blitz is designed around one feature: messaging. Unfortunately, the phone gets this feature wrong in almost every way. The dedicated messaging key is hidden among a jumble of small keys. The messaging apps themselves are wildly inconsistent, very basic and lack the advanced features that the intended audience will really use, like Facebook or MySpace integration. Typing is not only difficult, the keyboard actually works differently depending on which messaging app you're using. Instead of redeeming this phone with a good music player, a competent Web browser or a fun, effective camera, the phone is strangely a great navigator, which is probably the only feature the tweenage audience won't be craving. The price is right, but the phone is large and difficult to use, so we'd recommend looking elsewhere, like the LG enV2. Release: August 2008. Price: $50.
Pros: Good GPS navigation services. Inexpensive.
Cons: Messaging apps are sloppy and inconsistent. Keyboard keys are too small, while the device is too large. Slow networking, lousy browser, sub-par camera, basic music experience.
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Full Verizon Wireless Blitz Review:
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Design - Good
While this sort of wide, full-QWERTY slider hasn't yet appeared on the U.S. market, the design of the Verizon Wireless Blitz was already familiar to us as it reminded us of the Samsung Sangria, a European slider in the BlackJack vein. Because of the large keyboard, the Blitz has a much wider shell than your average slider, and resembles something like a makeup compact when closed. At 0.7-inches thick, it's a bit large to cram into tight jeans pockets, and definitely heavier than we'd like at more than 5 ounces. In fact, the phone is fairly light on features, lacking a 3G radio, Wi-Fi or even a large battery, so we wonder why the device had to be so big.
Verizon Wireless is bragging about the "My Messaging" key on the phone, but if you can find it the first time you look, you're more observant than we were. On top of the slide, there are dedicated keys for speech recognition and the speakerphone, but the messaging button isn't available until you open the keyboard, where you'll find the tiny mailbox key next to the space bar that jumps directly to Verizon's messaging menu. For a phone so focused on texting, the messaging button should have instantly opened a new message. There are dedicated buttons for the music menu and the camera on the side of the phone, but these were pretty sluggish and unresponsive. Plus, you have to be looking at the standby screen if you want them to work, you can't simply jump into the music player from anywhere on the phone.
Calling - Good
Calls on the Verizon Wireless Blitz sounded muddy, with lots of background noise. The phone is somewhat redeemed by the nice set of calling features it provides, but this will never make up for middling sound. Our callers also reported hearing plenty of noise on their end, as well. For reception, we got about 2-3 bars of 1xRTT reception in suburban New Jersey, which is on par with other Verizon Wireless phone's we've tested here. We were more satisfied with the phone's battery life. We managed to get more than 5 hours out of a single call, which beats Verizon's estimate by about a half hour.
For calling features, the phone has a dedicated speech recognition button right up top for speaker-independent voice dialing. We found this app to be perfectly accurate, an it had no trouble dialing numbers or even jumping to features on the phone at our spoken request. The contact list was light on fields, with plenty of space for phone numbers, but not much else beyond the basics. This is probably fine for the Blitz's younger audience, who won't be as concerned with business and home addresses anyway. The speaker phone could have been louder, but it was very convenient, with a button up top, next to the speech recognition key. Conference calling was also no trouble.
Messaging - Mediocre
Though the Verizon Wireless Blitz should be a fun, messaging-focused phone, the entire messaging experience instead feels cheap and loosely slapped together. It feels as though Verizon Wireless took their cheapest, most basic existing messaging apps for SMS text messaging, IM and e-mail, and just forced them to work on this device. The apps are a mess, an completely unpolished.
For example, in Text messaging, the phone is smart enough to capitalize the next letter after a period, but not so in the e-mail client. In IM and SMS messaging, the DEL key acts as a backspace, but in the e-mail app it acts as a forward delete, which we've never seen on a phone. In e-mail and IM, you can hold the special key to select the symbols that hover above the letter, but in text messaging you have to actually dig through a symbol menu, and the symbol keys are unavailable, even for typing numbers in a message. Worst of all, in the IM app, there is no icon to let you know if you are typing caps, numbers or plain letters, so our password was literally impossible to enter. We tried numerous combinations, but never managed to logon. The problems are so numerous that we couldn't imagine using this phone for messaging on a daily basis.
The keyboard doesn't improve things at all. The keys are tiny, hardly raised off the lower slide, and difficult to press. The wide, spacious layout does little to help typing, and we had to watch our fingers very closely to avoid typos. Finally, the phone lacks all but the most ubiquitous messaging clients. AOL, MSN and Yahoo users will be happy, but if you were hoping for Google or Facebook services, among others, there's little help for you here.
Music - Mediocre
The Verizon Wireless Blitz gets the standard V Cast-style music player we've never been impressed with on other Verizon phones, minus the V Cast music store. The player has the most basic playback options, with an easy playlist creator, but nothing too advanced or user friendly. You can synchronize music from Windows Media Player, but we had trouble adding music from our Macintosh. The phone isn't smart enough to find MP3 files on a memory card, they must be properly placed in the my_music folder. Then, the phone created dummy duplicates for every song we added, which meant we had 70 or so blank songs to skip through as we played our tracks.
We did have fun with a couple of the advanced features. For one thing, we liked being able to jump directly to our favorite playlist using the speech recognition feature. This turned out to be quicker than menu digging, as it should be. Second, we appreciate this basic phone packing A2DP for stereo Bluetooth headphones. We paired the phone with our wireless cans with no trouble.
Web browsing - Mediocre
The Openwave browser on the Verizon Wireless Blitz is woefully behind the times, an only made worse by the slow networking included on the phone. Instead of faster 3G networking, the Blitz uses 1xRTT (though a sticker suspiciously claims "Qualcomm 3G CDMA"). Everything about the browser was slow. Our own homepage choked the feeble app, but the New York Times mobile page took about 24 seconds to load. In fact, Google's Spartan homepage took about the same amount of time, and even the "Go To URL" page took 15 seconds to load up. 15 seconds just to type a Web address. With a full-QWERTY phone, since typing longer URLs is so much easier, we've come to expect a much better Web browsing experience than this.
GPS Navigation - Very Good
The saving grace of the Verizon Wireless Blitz is ironically its GPS features. Ironic because VZ Navigator does a great job with turn-by-turn driving directions, especially accounting for traffic problems on your route. But the audience for this phone probably won't be doing much driving, least of all not a daily commute with regular traffic issues. For parents, the phone also uses Verizon's Chaperone Child service, which gives VZW parents some ability to locate their child and be warned when the kid isn't where they're supposed to be. We'd trade great navigation for much better messaging and media applications, but it's worth noting that VZ Navigator is always pretty good, even on this budget device.
Camera - Mediocre
The 1-megapixel camera on the Verizon Wireless Blitz took some lousy pictures. Colors were at times too bright, at times faded into an overly sharpened, if not posterized glow. Focus was an issue, especially on our happy snap self portrait shot.
Outdoor Flower
Our first sample demonstrates just about everything that can go wrong with a photograph. The overall effect might have been interesting, like a strange, alien impressionist painting, if that was remotely what we had been going for.
Video Game Box
Surprisingly, the Blitz did okay with this shot, perhaps owing to the already-cartoonish effect of the game cover.
Self Portrait
We couldn't get this phone to cooperate for a well-focused self-portrait. There is a mirror next to the lens, but we can't see using it to take these blurry shots. Also, we're not quite sure how our beige walls and beige fax machine seem to be exploding with white light, as the light in the room was only coming from a desk lamp and a 60-watt bulb.
Price and availability
The Verizon Wireless Blitz is available now for $50 with a contract agreement.
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