We crack open the ultimate Mobile TV phone, the LG Voyager, with a touch screen and haptic feedback. Is it just an updated enV, or a multimedia powerhouse?
Review summary of the LG Voyager:
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 In many ways, the LG Voyager is a real iPhone competitor, perhaps even the first touchscreen phone to come close. It has a great video option in V Cast Mobile TV, and, with some setup, the Voyager could even be a good music phone, if you take the time to sideload your own music. The camera was surprisingly good, and auto-focus definitely helped. We even liked the onscreen keyboard, thanks to the Voyager's haptic feedback, and wished it were used more on the device. There are limitations. The interface, while improved from Verizon's standard fare, is far from slick, and doesn't have the graphical flourishes we would have liked to see on such a cool phone. Also, call quality was disappointing, and that's a downside we can't ignore. Finally, even with the haptic feedback, there wasn't one thing on this phone that wowed us or blew us away. But altogether, the whole package is worth a look. Release: November 2007. Price: $300.
Pros: Haptic feedback spoiled us for other touch phones. Good new touch interface. V Cast TV looks like real TV. Camera a nice surprise.
Cons: Call quality was disappointing. More apps should use widescreen QWERTY. Web browsing navigation could have been more responsive.
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Full review of the LG Voyager:
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Let's get the comparisons out of the way early. The LG Voyager wants to be an Apple iPhone killer, and it could be the very first bona fide contender. It does plenty of things that the iPhone can't, and while it isn't perfect, for many users its shortcomings won't detract from the significant advantages over Apple's device. Forgive us for glossing over the hardware keyboard in this review; we'll discuss whether we enjoyed using it for messaging, but whenever we could, we kept the lid closed on this device, and tried to rely on touch for whatever functions we could.
Design - Very good
The LG Voyager is easy to describe. It's an LG enV with a large, 2.8-inch touchscreen on the exterior instead of the numeric keypad. But if LG had simply stopped there, slapping a touchscreen onto the enV, this phone wouldn't be half the device it is. The touch screen is reinforced by haptic feedback, so whenever you tap the screen you get a slight buzz. It's a great effect, and it made the screen much more pleasant to use than the screens on more static devices.
The Touch interface has improved upon the Verizon Wireless in some nice ways. For one, Verizon has kept the LG Voyager in their walled garden, so you'll be familiar with the features if you've used a VZW phone before. But the garden looks much nicer on this phone, and they've put the best plants up near the front entrance. So VZ Navigator and the Web browser--formerly buried under the "Get it now" menu--are now top-level menu options, just as they should be. Perhaps we understand hiding V Cast Mobile TV, as it won't be available to all potential customers, but we can't understand why the mobile e-mail app is hidden, while SMS and IM are near the top.
The internal QWERTY on the Voyager is nice, but a little flat for our tastes. We prefer HTC's excellent keys, like we found on the AT&T Tilt. The Voyager's onscreen keyboard, however, is the best software keyboard we've seen on a phone. It beats the Apple iPhone with its haptic feedback, though its design is otherwise very similar. Unfortunately, like the iPhone, the Voyager doesn't let you use the wide, touch QWERTY keyboard everywhere you want, and gives you a 12-key pad on screen for SMS messaging, or sometimes makes you open the flip to use the hard keys.
Calling - Good
Call quality on the Voyager was disappointing, and in many ways the calling features are simply average. Though the soft buttons on the touch screen looked nice and polished, there were no new or outstanding calling features to take advantage of the technology, and some of our favorite features were missing. Speaker-independent voice dialing worked perfectly, but we miss conference calling, which the Voyager lacks. Bluetooth worked well for calling, and the speaker phone was nice and loud, better with the phone open than closed. The address book was unfortunately average, and though it had plenty of fields, a touch screen phone cries out for innovative speed dialing, like the "Hollywood Squares"-style menu on the HTC Touch on Sprint.
For calling times, we managed a phone call over four and a half hours, longer than Verizon Wireless' four-hour pledge. Still, that's not much for a multimedia phone, and V Cast Mobile TV is even more of a resource hog. On a long train commute home, we managed to drain the battery in less than three hours, watching television and browsing the Web, then navigating from the train station to home.
Messaging - Very good
Messaging was fine on the LG Voyager's touch screen, but the best experience required opening the phone. This is too bad, as the Voyager's on-screen keyboard is nothing to hide. We enjoyed using it when it did pop up, but this wasn't in the text messaging or instant messaging apps. The phone supports AOL, MSN and Yahoo for IM, and had no trouble setting up our Gmail account without additional help from us, even though Gmail wasn't one of the listed presets. The phone can also handle picture messages and video messages, though we wish there was a way to e-mail pictures. Instead, the e-mail app is somewhat buried, and separate from the standard "Messaging" window.
Music - Good
The LG Voyager features an improved version of the V Cast Music Store, similar to what we found on the Motorola Q9m, though on the latter it was optimized for a clickwheel, while on this device every button is touchable. This makes using the player a much better experience, and we found plenty of options we'd never seen on a Verizon Wireless phone. For one thing, we could now scrub through tracks by dragging the progress bar, which worked perfectly. Playlist creation is as easy on the Voyager as it is on the iPhone, simply checking which songs should belong to your new list. Strangely, the list creator brings up the widescreen QWERTY without vibration from haptic feedback. We were able to shrug this off, as it only reminded us how much we like the vibrating feature elsewhere.
Verizon Wireless still has expensive song downloads; you'll spend twice as much as the $1 you'll spend on iTunes or even Sprint's music store. Also, though the Voyager comes with a USB cable and a disk with music transfer software (both rarities on Verizon Wireless), memory is B.Y.O. The Voyager can take cards up to 8GB, if you can find such a beast. The music store has an enjoyably deep catalog, but downloading multiple tracks is a long process and sans automation, so you almost certainly won't be building your library this way.
Finally, we had some trouble with stereo Bluetooth setup. Using our Motorola S9 headphones, we had no trouble listening to music or watching television. However, on the new Samsung YA-BS300 speakers we've been testing, we could only hear system sounds, and no media content whatsoever. Also, we would have preferred a 3.5mm headphone jack to the 2.5mm jack on the Voyager, so we could use our favorite earbuds instead.
Video - Very good
The LG Voyager is the best available phone for watching Verizon's V Cast Mobile TV service, thanks to its large, wide screen. Television on the phone looked excellent, leaps and bounds better than the short clips you'd expect from all the carriers' standard 3G video services. Though the service only sports eight channels and doesn't carry all the major networks, there were always good options for killing plenty of time. NBC and CBS both offered first-run, prime time shows, including Heroes and Bionic Woman. Comedy Central also offered its stable of shows, including the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. What else could you ask for? Maybe DVR capabilities for one, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. If you are interested in live broadcast video, and prefer watching a show live to buying it from a download store, V Cast Mobile TV and the LG Voyager are a great pair.
Music videos should have been better, especially compared to the Mobile TV service. Of course, Mobile TV gives you MTV, but it's been hard to find music on MTV for a decade now. Music videos and streaming clips from V Cast still look a bit blocky, and take up less of the screen, even in full-screen mode. Better to stick with Mobile TV and power through "Days of Our Lives."
GPS - Good
Because GPS navigation is one of the clutch features the LG Voyager holds over the iPhone, it would be easy to overlook some of the apps foibles, but it could still use some improvement. The GPS sensor was satisfyingly strong, even finding us indoors with only a small window-view of the sky. Navigation also loaded quickly, and the maps were readable, though they could have been much nicer (maybe even a 3D-view option, perhaps?). Unfortunately, when we got lost from the directions, VZ Navigator didn't automatically reroute and find us. We had to start over and reload directions from our current location, which was annoying, though not terminal. Still, the Voyager has it, the iPhone doesn't, and we'd rather have than have not.
Web browsing - Good
First of all, we appreciate that the Web browser is now a top-level menu choice, both in the "Shortcuts" and main menus. This had long been a complaint of ours, and finally Verizon Wireless doesn't seem to be hiding its internet client. The browser itself is competent, and had no problem with our page. For navigating pages you can drag the touch screen window, but scrolling didn't respond very quickly, so this wasn't the instantaneous experience it is on the Apple iPhone. Too bad that no other manufacturer can get that drag and fling navigating thing quite right.
So it seems that opening the phone might be the way to go, which is too bad, because the internet browser is one of the few places you can experience the Voyager's onscreen QWERTY keyboard. Similar to the iPhone's, the Voyager's QWERTY keys are slightly smaller, however, but the haptic feedback makes it feel much more responsive. And we mean that literally, as the tiny vibrations, which you can adjust for strength, give a much better physical feel to the keyboard, and make it seem more real. Because the keyboard is used for Web browsing and not messaging, we didn't bother with predictive input or auto-correction, but we would have liked to see this keyboard everywhere on the Voyager where text is entered.
Camera - Very good
We were pleasantly surprised by the camera on the LG Voyager. Perhaps the auto-focus makes all the difference, but we found images to be accurate, with nice, rich colors. There was some blurring around edges, and zooming-in revealed some noise, even in good lighting. But, for a 2-megapixel sensor, this phone creates images that we found usable and even enjoyable. Under low-light, things fall apart a bit, so it wasn't as impressive filming the holiday light show at New York's Time Warner Center. But, with QVGA videos and some nice imaging options, the camera on the Voyager is not only a nice feature, it's also another way the Voyager trumps other touch screen devices.
Price and availability
The LG Voyager is available now from Verizon Wireless for $300 with a two-year contract and an instant online discount of $50.
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