Verizon's strange new clamshell is loaded with media and made for messaging. Will your friends turn green-eyed with envy when they see it?
Review summary of the LG VX9900:
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 With its distinctive styling and comfortable keyboard, the LG enV (an update to the LG VX9800) might have been poised to give T-Mobile's Sidekick 3 a run for its money. Unfortunately, the VX9900 small screens coupled with its overall bulkiness give the phone a dated feel, especially when it's closed, and lacking an interesting or at least intuitive menu system, the phone will have a hard time winning converts from the Sidekick crowd. Though the enV handles video better than most phones we've seen, its audio player is obviously geared towards selling tunes rather than playing them, and the Web browser is hidden deep in Verizon's aging nest of menus. All in all, the enV struck us as a good idea in need of some serious tweaking. Release: November 2006. Price: $200.
Pros: Very good call quality. Excellent video handling. Camera better than on most phones. Comfortable keyboard.
Cons: Lack of necessary accessories. Closing phone resets to standby screen. Media player is very basic. Messaging apps should be more robust.
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Full review of the LG VX9900:
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Design
Like the VX9800 before it, the LG VX9900 enV is both a thick clamshell and a small QWERTY flip phone. Closed, the phone has a small external screen, almost too small for anything but dialing. Open, the internal screen is bright and colorful, but also proportionally small, just over two inches, relative to the open lid, with a large black frame around the screen highlighting the wasted space. The clamshell opens with a snap to two stages: tilted about 135 degrees, and completely open. Speakers flank the screen, and the camera is found on the back of the case. Unlike the Cingular 8525, which swaps nicely between views when you slide out the keyboard, the VX9900 only keeps your work when you open the phone; closing the clamshell quits any open apps and returns you to the standby screen, an annoying design flaw that made calling from the contacts list much more difficult.
Calling - Good
Phone calls are obviously easier to make on the LG VX9900 when the phone is closed. Unfortunately, the external display is so tiny that interacting with the contacts list becomes a chore. The contact fields themselves seem a bit barren; no big deal for a lightweight phone, but disappointing for a hefty messaging phone such as this. Calls sounded good, with only a slight bit of static, and the phone did a great job suppressing background noise as we talked on a busy Manhattan street. The speakerphone is loud and clear, and the phone also supports speaker-independent voice dialing and Bluetooth. In our tests, we got just under four and a quarter hours of talk time; respectable, but about 15 minutes less than promised.
Messaging - Good
The enV does a good -- but not great -- job handling SMS and instant messaging, and this is an area where the phone should shine. The comfortable keyboard is as the one we tested on the Cingular 8525, though the space between keys was a little much for our taste. Symbols are scattered about above the letter and number keys, making them a bit hard to find. Both screens, including the crisp internal screen, seemed a bit small for reading a great deal of text. The external screen showed about 115 characters of an incoming message, which was quite a bit to cram in. The internal showed a full 160 characters with plenty of room to spare. The phone handles instant messaging and e-mail from Hotmail, AOL, and Yahoo, but leaves out some popular e-mail options (such as Gmail).
Camera - Good
The 2-megapixel camera takes fine pictures, if a little blocky, and colors are accurate and sharp. Color seemed to suffer a bit when we used the LED flash, turning images colder, but the autofocus worked fairly well, though it took a moment to focus and release the shutter. The phone has numerous options for sharing photos, including Bluetooth, e-mail, MMS and PictBridge printing via Bluetooth; unfortunately, it lacks editing tools and MMS-friendly options like frames or captions, a shame considering the enV's focus on messaging.
Video - Very good
Though we wish the enV's screen were a bit wider, considering the room on both sides of the internal display, the phone is one of the few we've seen that displays full-screen streaming video, without any border. The enV is also the first phone we've tested that streams the audio track from a video to stereo Bluetooth headphones, a definite plus. Video looks pretty good on the V Cast network. We were disappointed by the occasional stuttering on fast-action clips, such as the preview for "Spider-Man 3", but the wide range of content was welcome. Buffering speeds were negligible, usually less than five seconds from selection to start.
Audio - Good
Verizon's V Cast network does a good job offering new content for purchase, but the VX9900 drops the ball once you've actually downloaded your tunes. The music player is barren, capable of only the most basic playback options. All synchronizing is handled by Windows Media Player on your PC, which is fine if you've never used the superior Apple iTunes. Finding tracks on the phone can be difficult, and playback stops when you select a menu option -- or, worse, when you close your phone to put it in your pocket. We were also bummed by the lack of dedicated music buttons on the phone, and the volume buttons are on the hinge side of the phone, which means they're blocked when the phone is open at an angle. On a positive note, setting up stereo Bluetooth headphones couldn't have been easier.
Multimedia and GPS - Very good
The LG VX9900 boasts a fearless Web browser, navigating large pages like The New York Times homepage without complaint. Though layout is a bit dodgy in the phone's one-column view -- the only layout option -- all images and links loaded fine, and the entire page was legible and clear. Though the phone offers a smooth scrolling option for pages, this seemed ineffective, and scrolling long pages required literally hundreds of clicks. We were also annoyed that the browser itself was buried under the "Get It Now" menu as "News and Info," rather than appearing as a top-level menu item as we've seen on countless other handsets. GPS worked competently through VZ Navigator, though we had a hard time finding a GPS signal near our offices in lower Manhattan.
Accessories - Poor
Like most V Cast phones, the LG VX9900 comes with absolutely no accessories. For music, you must buy the media essentials kit, which comes with headphones, software and the USB cable, and a memory card. Though the phone is advertised as a "V Cast Music Phone," you will be mostly unable to take advantage of these music features without the additional accessories.
Price and availability
The LG VX9900 is available immediately from Verizon Wireless and retails for $150 with a two-year service agreement.
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