LG Voyager

The phone overall is a great phone. The touch screen has a good responsiveness. The keyboard is a huge plus over the iphone! My phone restarts randomly sometimes, I don't know if its a phone problem or the battery problem. But it would just restart every once in a while whether im off the phone or on.

Voyager Review

Here is my initial review of the Voyager with setup experience and functionality comments.

Unboxing

- In the box was a battery, phone, travel charger, USB cable, VCAST Music Essentials CD-ROM and instruction manual. The unit was well protected with the usual offering of tape button coverings and plastic screen lift-off protectors.


Interface

- Touch Screen: my first issue with the touch screen was trouble with navigating to the phone setup screen to grab the phone number assigned to the device. I successfully got to the setup screen, but needed to scroll down to get to the particular command I needed. The scroll bar was not responsive to my tries to scroll down and I ended up loading the wrong command at first. I ended up opening the unit and used the directional pad on the keyboard to get where I needed to go. I then learned of the touch scrolling method, which is to press on the screen for a second or two and slide my finger up or down to "drag" the contents of the screen up or down. It is easy to launch commands unexpectedly but I became better with practice.

- Tactile feedback with a command execution is accomplished by vibrating the phone when a command is launched. This is a nice feature, and in my opinion is better than a tone for relaying information to the user that a command request has been detected during routine phone functions. The vibration becomes problematic though in two areas... when browsing (vibrations just become too frequent) and when the unit is sitting on a flat desk (phone can move a little). Vibrate level of "low" was enough for me... other options are "Medium", "High", and "Off".


Menu Commands

- There seems to be a common theme within the menu commands of the CLR command meaning "OK" or "Exit". To me this is not intuitive, as "CLR" usually stands for "Clear", which means "erase". For example, when loading the camera and using the touch interface to select settings, it wasn't immediately apparent on how to apply the choices I made and get back to camera mode. To do this, one needs to touch "CLR" to save the settings.


Dimensions and Externals

- The unit feels and appear bigger than the enV, though the opposite is actually true when analyzing the dimensions... Voyager is 6.98 cubic inches vs enV's 7.53 cubic inches. Voyager is slightly wider and longer than the enV, but the enV is slightly thicker. Weights are only three grams apart with Voyager being slightly heavier.

- The keyboard keys are a little larger than the enV and are more comfortable to push. It is even easier now to open the phone, place on a desk, and use two-pinky typing.


Reception

- In most of my phone reviews I put units through the "basement test" in my house. If a phone can maintain a conversation in my basement for at least five minutes without dropping, I consider that a pass. It seems to have similar performance to my enV... hit or miss. The Pearl passed and my RAZR passes, but the Voyager seemed to be looking for signal half the time. In other parts of the house it performed well.


Call Quality

- At the volume I had the headset on (Medium High) I could hear distortion at times during a couple of test calls, though it wasn't terribly annoying. The parties on the other end said it sounded good, better than the Pearl.


Battery

- After fully charging the unit, I browsed and played with online offerings such as Web sites, VZNavigator, and MobileTV. After about two hours of solid use the unit was trading back and forth between two and three bars of battery. Four hours after a full charge it was fluctuating between one and two bars. In that time I spent perhaps an hour browsing data and watching MobileTV, talked about thirty minutes, sent about ten text messages, and did a lot of fiddling and playing around. That was pretty high use, so I estimate it would last two days with my normal usage patterns assuming I use data occasionally.


Bluetooth

- I attempted to send all of my Contacts on my Motorola Q9m to the Voyager with mixed success. I sent them en masse, and in a number of cases I got an alert popup that said something like "check number" or "check email". For the contact records that had a problem, it appears to have skipped saving those contacts. I had 222 to transfer, and 160-odd made it over. They ended up sorted by on the Voyager, and there doesn't appear to be an option to sort by last name (the Bluetooth send likely just sent over a "Name").

- The Voyager paired easily with my Plantronics 510 headset (coincidentally the Plantronics Voyager). There was some hiss in the headset, more so than with the Pearl. There seemed to be a bit of signal delay when launching a call command from the headset. Instead of hearing "Say a Command" I heard the headset pair up and "a Command". From that point forward the call was acceptable.


Memory Card

- I placed the 2GB microSD card I used with the enV into the Voyager and all of the videos, pictures, and music were loadable on the Voyager as-is.


Applications and Tools

- The calendar looks nice, though it would have been nicer if the unit came with synchronization software to take advantage of it.

- The calculator is fun to use with the touch screen. I can get answers quicker out of it than I can with phones with typical calculator interfaces where I must hit a directional pad a certain way to invoke a given mathematical function. It was nice having dedicated touch-buttons for everything.

- This area is one where I wish Verizon opened up the phone a little to third-party applications. I like to read books on PDAs and smartphones, and the big screen on the Voyager probably would have been nice for book reading. Unfortunately, no Mobipocket Reader compatibility with this unit.


Music

- The music player is similar to those found on the enV. Basic functionality that works pretty well. Sound quality is 7/10... pretty good but slightly muddy. One distraction is that while playing a song, if you want to open some options or browse the rest of the library the current song will stop playing. Opening and closing the phone introduces a half-second pause in playback.


Videos

- My microSD card from the enV, which contains music, a movie, pictures taken on the enV, etc. Video playback of my 3GP movies looked good, however while watching a video on the external screen an "Options" button is present in the lower-right corner of the display that will not go away. Efforts to clear it out merely resulted in exiting full-screen mode. Flipping the phone open, I expected the video to continue playing on the internal screen however the video was chopped off on the left side. When I closed the unit again the video player simply went away and I was back at the default phone ready screen.

- MobileTV worked acceptably in my fringe area.


Camera

- Picture quality is very good outdoors, with typical camera phone performance indoors with lighting (grainy). I miss the slidable lens cover from the enV, as well as the graphics shown when auto-focus is working. The enV had yellow brackets on-screen showing the focus point and the Voyager has white ones. Depending on the picture you are taking it is harder to see the white brackets.


Data Services

- Web browsing worked pretty well, and even better when I switched the screen rendering to "Screen Optimized". I was puzzled as to why that isn't the default setting as it works so much better. I found myself reverting to the internal screen after a while though because I was much more productive using the directional keyboard pad than
hitting tiny links with my adult-sized fingers on the touch screen.

- The GMail app worked easily enough, though when I first logged in the application told me it expected ActiveX because it thought I was running Internet Explorer. When I went to "basic html" mode the application ran fine. It may be that the browser used by the Voyager should be reporting itself as a mobile browser. I noticed this caused issues when opening up other sites such as msnbc.com. The full PC browser version seemed to be loading, rather than a mobile version of the site that I see on other mobile units.

- VZNavigator: I launched VZNavigator and was impressed by how good it looked on the large external screen. Fonts and such were clear enough to read while driving once I found a place in the car to set it. I quickly discovered however that when the Voyager is closed, the audio navigation prompts are just not loud enough to hear over road noise. I ended up pointing the device to my head in such a way that the clamshell gab was pointed toward me, which helped the audio issue but obviously killed all ability to see the visual prompts. I ended up opening the device and setting it on the dashboard, which worked very well for both audio and visual prompts. The size of the internal screen is smaller than the external, but still big enough to handle VZNavigator better than any other Verizon unit I have navigated with.



Unit Strengths Summary

- Touch interface is new for Verizon phones
- Tactile feedback
- Camera quality for outdoors and well-lit areas


Unit Weaknesses Summary

- Touch interface has a coolness factor, however for "getting things done" on the phone I found myself opening up the unit and using the keyboard and directional pad.
- Firmware updates are needed to clean up various interface quirks, improve video playback behavior, and make button commands such as "CLR" more intuitive.


Overall impression: The touch screen is new and different, but I came away thinking the bun should have been in the oven a little longer. The touch interface could use some help in scrolling, and I found myself going back to the keypad pretty often. Other aspects of the phone are very nice though... the two large screens make video playback pleasant, and after a firmware update to clean up video playback I would expect the experience to be even better.