This is Phone Arena’s video review of the new LG Voyager offered by Verizon Wireless.
The Voyager is one of the most anticipated phones to be released this year. It features a large 2.81 inch, Touch-Sensitivity Display on the front with a standard display and QWERTY keypad on the inside. On the exterior are the Send, End, and Clear buttons, Volume Rocker, Slide and Lock button and Camera button, 2.5mm Headset Jack and MicroSD card slot that can accommodate up to an eight-gigabyte memory card. On the back is a two-megapixel auto-focus camera and standard battery.
One of the main features of the Voyager is the Touch-Sensitivity Display which is pressure sensitive, not heat sensitive which means you can use your finger or even a stylus or a pin tap. When the phone is in standby, it will show an animated locked icon on the bottom of the screen. Once it is activated, there are four icons along the bottom for message, phone, menu, and contacts.
Pressing the phone icon will bring up a 12-key dial pad on the screen. It’s used just like the normal dial pad to enter in the number that you wish to call. Unfortunately, there are several times that the wrong number accidently got pressed causing us to go back and fix the mistake.
Tapping on the center of the screen will bring up 12 shortcut icons to allow one-touch access to such things as the browser, PC navigator, Bluetooth and music. Unfortunately, if one of these icons is for something that you don’t use such as Mobile TV, you can’t replace it with something else nor can you move icons around on the screen which means they have to stay in the order in which they are shown.
The main menu is divided into Get It Now, Messaging, Contacts, Recent Calls and Settings and Tools. There are adjustments for two different themes, color in black and white or also Settings for menu font and also for different clock formats.
Sending a text message can be done in one of the two ways. The first way is by using the Touch Display which will show us standard 12-key dial pad that you can use T9 predictive entry. This is easiest when you’re only needing to type in a few words. The second way is by flipping the phone open and using the large internal QWERTY keypad. It has been redesigned since the enV with larger buttons and brighter backlight for the letters. We found that using the QWERTY keypad could be beneficial when having to type in longer messages.
The Voyager is the first non-PDA or smart phone to incorporate a basic HTML browser instead of the standard web browser. Once it have launched, it will show icons for news, sports, weather and entertainment. Pressing the Go to WWW icon will allow you to enter in a standard HTML website address by using the Touch display.
Not intense of websites such as Google will only take a few seconds to open but larger websites such as phonearena.com will take upwards to 15 seconds. Once the side is loaded, you can press and drag the page around with your finger. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of horizontal and vertical scrolling that must be done. One way around this is to zoom out on the page.
Since we’re on the pages shown on the screen, this eliminates most of the scrolling that needs to be done. Most websites are shown properly formatted but since the Voyager only uses a basic HTML browser, you cannot use plug-ins such as Adobe Flash. This limits its functionality since streaming videos from the standard YouTube site cannot be displayed. However, you can trim videos from the mobile YouTube site since it does not require flash.
It takes a couple of seconds to buffer and then we’ll begin playback. You can select between full screen and standard screen formats. Overall, the HTML browser on the Voyager is a big improvement from using a standard web browser but it’s not without its problems.
Scrolling through pages and pressing text links with your finger can sometimes be problematic. We found that using the stylus or pin tap to be easier and more precise. The music player can be launch from the front screen and is laid out for easy touch access. You can scroll through list of albums and select the specific track you wish to hear. Once it begins playback, there are icons for repeat, shuffle, rewind and fast forward along the sides. However, since that their speakers are next to the internal screen, music will sound muffled unless you flip the photo open. Once that is done, music quality is relatively good but does lack an interface. The only around this is to use a Bluetooth carrier headset or wired earbuds.
Up to 1000 people can be entered into your contacts list. Out of those 98 can be stored for speed dial locations. When reviewing the list on the front screen, you can scroll the list up and down and you can also select letter icons on the top or you can go to the Go To field and type in the name of a person that you wish to search for. The calendar is fairly basic showing the current month and date. You can press the arrow icon at the top to move forward and backward one month at a time. Once the date is selected, you can add a specific event that the phone will alert you to. This is an easy way of keeping track of appointments while on the go.
The Voyager features a two-megapixel camera with auto-focus and is fairly easy to use with the external touch display. Images taken outside have good color saturation but have soft edges and light fine detail. Internal images only look good when there is a substantial amount of white. Since there isn’t a built-in flash, mobile images are nearly impossible to take.
The Voyager has very good signal reception and we were able to place and receive calls around South Florida and while in fringe areas. The call quality through the ear piece speaker is also good as long as we kept the volume at medium. If we raised the volume to high, we can hear a substantial amount of distortion in the earpiece speaker. This is also true when using the speaker phone function. However, using the Bluetooth headset will eliminate this problem.
Overall, we are quite pleased with the Voyager as it is a nice improvement over the enV. The large Touch-Sensitivity Display is its main feature but it can be a little temperamental to use at times. The HTML browser, two-megapixel camera, QWERTY keypad and mobile TV surface make it an all-in-one device that it’s hard to pass up.
Please visit phonearena.com for a full review of the LG Voyager.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services