vB Easy Archive - LG Voyager (Verizon Wireless)

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LG Voyager (Verizon Wireless)
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Posted by: Kent-45

I've had the LG Voyager since a couple weeks after it was released, and I know that the internet is littered with reviews about this handset, not to mention the hype and criticism. I had been a long time LG EnV user up until the Voyager, so often you may catch me comparing the two phones... for the simple reason that the LG Voyager is, in its most base fundamental way, an upgrade to the LG EnV. Everyone seems to ask the same question: Is this an iPhone? The answer is no. It is not an iphone, it's not even a smartphone by most definitions. If anything I think the LG Voyager is more like a pocket-knife of sorts. Many different features, but none of them probably as good as a single device dedicated to just that use.

(( Design ))

The LG Voyager is a black candybar phone, with a mettalic accent and full touchscreen display. The back of the phone is now completely flat (Anyone with an EnV will know that the camera has been removed) - Ultimately, the device is a tad wider than the EnV, but it fits into your hand very nicely. The casing has a rubberized texture to the back, making it feel much better in your hand, where the LG EnV often felt cheap and plastic. People have critcized this phone for being “fat” - but it's not really the case. When I had an EnV, people would almost always comment on the size of the phone... the Voyager doesn't look or feel excessively “big”, like the EnV did. Overall it's lines are much smoother and sleeker, and it's quite sexy as far as some of the handsets I've seen go. The LG Voyager then opens up to reveal a full QWERTY keyboard. It should be noted that the LG Voyager's keys are bigger and more tactile than the EnV's and so if you've been using the EnV for years, the Voyager will take some getting used to. The screens are much bigger as well, and you will quickly notice this if you put the EnV and Voyager side-by-side. The screens are pretty gorgeous and sharp, and are probably one of my favorite aspects of this phone. To sum things up – the Voyager has a much simplified design. 3 buttons on the exterior, and a very smooth sleek case.

That's not to say that the Voyager doesn't have design flaws, which it does. It still uses those annoying coverings for the phone charger port and MicroSD slot. I've had the phone for a while now and I can tell that after frequent use, I wouldn't be surprised if the coverings fell or broke off. On top of that, the camera lens on the back is right where you want to rest your finger when you've got the phone open. With no lens cover, it's easy to get fingerprints and smudges all over it.

(( Phone Calls / Call Quality ))

Call quality was one of the big factors for me when purchasing a phone, it has to be good, and for the most part the phone delivers. It should be noted that if you are using the earbud/microphone combo that Verizon includes with their Data Cable Pack (or whatever it's called) there is a slight audible hiss in the background. It's faint, and not particularly annoying as it seems to go away when you place calls, but it's just something to point out. The reception on this device seems much better than I had with the EnV. I don't know if they changed the internal antenna or what, but I remember distinctly with my EnV would often have trouble with reception. The Voyager has none of these problems. I've used it indoors, outdoors, on the road, on the highway, even with 1 or 2 bars the call quality doesn't seem to falter. I was markedly impressed, I must admit. Whether it be the Verizon network or the handset itself, I have never had a reception problem.

(( Interface / Touchscreen ))

Anybody that's been with Verizon knows that they love to brand their phones and impose, often hideous interfaces, onto otherwise functional stock ones. All their reasons aside, the LG Voyager's interface has gotten a huge facelift from anything you may be used to. It's important to know that there are literally TWO interfaces in the LG Voyager, there's the one you use with the phone closed and the one you use with the phone open. When the phone is closed, you will see a fairly snazzy homescreen that looks very I- You need to have the phone open to use pretty much ANY (except for Mobile IM and VZNavigator) of the Verizon applications or games that you download. The touchscreen interface is responsive, I've found. I would highly recommend using a STYLUS for the LG Voyager, as it makes things a million times easier. One aspect of this phone that is rather annoying is the fact that in order to prevent you from activating buttons on the phone while it's in your pocket, it locks the screen. The screen can only be unlocked by tapping a tiny lock button on the corner of the screen. I've found that sometimes the button doesn't respond very well, so you'll be tapping multiple times to unlock your screen. Whenever you make a phone call, the screen also locks out, which seems like a good feature on paper but when you're dialing voicemail and it wants your password... OOH... no can do, gotta unlock that screen first. It's annoying to say the least, but I suppose a necessary evil for touchscreen phones.

People seem to rant and rave about the “tactile feedback” that is featured in this phone. It basically gives you a tiny vibration every time you touch the screen, this is more of a novelty though and you'll realize very quickly how annoying and useless it is when you're trying to browse a website. If you're like me, I had it turned off almost after the 2nd day of owning the device, and haven't turned it on since. So to sum up, the interface is relatively the same as the EnV, although it has a much more streamlined professional look to it now. You can change the fonts for the interface, but you'll quickly notice that every font except the Verizon font pretty much cripples the interface into an unreadable mess (Why would anyone want their cell phone interface in cursive anyway?) - There are two color themes, “Color” and “Black and White” - again there are not many customization options but it should be noted that this is more customization than I've ever had with a Verizon phone, so I guess it's a step in the right direction.

(( Web Browsing / Data ))

One of the biggest features of this phone is probably the EVDO that it utilizes. If you get this phone, you want to be sure that you have the Verizon Vpak with the unlimited data or you will get charged out the ***. It should be noted that you do not need a Verizon data plan to use the LG Voyager. It runs on your normal voice plan. Anyway, the phone's data speeds are exceptional and I've never had a problem. The web browser is a full fledged HTML web browser, but again this is somewhat misleading as the web browser cannot do (or does not handle well) sites that have:
Flash or Shockwave
Complex scripts or Java
Popups

What does this mean? This means that if you were to go to www.facebook.com on your Voyager, and you clicked the “Remember Me” button, the little pop-up that it wants to show you would appear as a giant black box. Complex or bandwidth intensive sites will often hang the phone, and there is no flash support so anything with Flash or ActiveX is going to not load or give you errors.

The browser has 3 rendering modes... Normal, Screen Optimized, and Text Only. Normal is just as it sounds, the most truest HTML rendering of the site you're seeing. Screen Optimized basically scrunches and mangles sites to fit inside the screen, which works well for sites that are very TEXT HEAVY but other than that, I find it to be more trouble than it's worth. Text Only is probably the most useless of the features, as it literally renders your site as text only... most sites become completely unusuable as it doesn't render links in this mode.

The speeds are decent for browsing, it's very dependent on the size and complexity of the site. Google, Gmail, and such will load in seconds, while a larger site or Facebook/Myspace may take up to 10 seconds. However I think it's fair to say that if you think you're going to get broadband speeds and be able to do everything you can do on your desktop, you're in for a rude awakening. The browser is usefull for checking your e-mail, browsing ebay, chatting on forums, Facebooking, wikipedia, and that sort of thing.

If you empty your phone's browser memory on a regular basis it seems to be stable. So far the browser has only crashed the phone on me once. The EnV used to crash very frequently, so apparently they've done something right.

(( Camera ))

The camera is where the Voyager seems to succeed and fail at the same time. As I said previously, the bulky hideous camera from the EnV was removed for a simple camera lense. It's protected, so there's no need to open or close anything to use it, and it's the same 2 megapixels as the EnV was. However you will quickly notice there is a very distinct difference between pictures taken with the EnV and pictures taken with the Voyager. The quality with the Voyager is really hit or miss, it can take gorgeous pictures but at the same time it can take the blurriest ugliest pictures you've ever seen. Low light conditions are the main culprit – if the lighting isn't good, you'll find most of your pictures are too dark to see. The phone is good for snapshots and recording short movies, but this will not replace your digital camera by any stretch of the imagination. There are tons of settings to tweak and play with for taking pictures, but at the end of the day it's a pretty average camera. You point it, you shoot it, you send that funny picture of your drunk friend to 10 people... end of story.

(( SMS/MMS Messaging ))

Text messaging on the Voyager is literally unchanged from the the way it was on the EnV. I'll admit I was hoping for some SMS threading but alas no. It throws all your text and picture messages into your inbox indiscriminately and lets you sort them out. The Voyager can hold up to 200 messages in the inbox, and 200 in the sentbox although after the firmware update I received, the sentbox will only hold 50. It's handy to have such a large inbox, but you'll quickly realize that scrolling 5 minutes just to find a message you received 2 days ago is a big waste of time. However in the Voyager's defense, if there's one thing it does well, that's text messaging. You can fire them off quickly, and the QWERTY keypad let's you type very easily and efficiently. If you get this phone you will want a messaging package of some sort, or else you are missing out on one of the fundamental aspects of this phone. Picture messaging has been improved in that no matter what size picture you take, the program will automatically RESIZE your photo so that it can be sent as a MMS message. This was something the EnV did, and as a result you wouldn't be able to send high resolution pictures because of their size. Now you can take 1600x1200 pictures and send them easily.

You can send SMS messages with the phone closed and it will essentially bring up a touchscreen keypad for you to use. It's good for short messages or sending a quick picture, but if you're going to be doing heavy texting it will just slow you down.

(( GPS / VZNavigator ))

Another feature that people are always asking me about on this phone is the GPS. I will just clarify right now that the GPS on this phone is not true GPS, it is based on a combination of GPS satellites and cell towers. What does this mean? This means that if you don't get cell service, you're not going to be able to get GPS directions, navigation, etc. I discovered this the hard way while on a road trip to Arkansas, and even on some parts of the highway there was not enough signal to get a GPS lock. This means that if you plan to use the GPS outside of cell service, then you might want to reconsider for a phone with full GPS capabilities. Anyone that has been with Verizon knows that they have a big lockdown on GPS, the only way they want you to use it is through their proprietary program VZNavigator which costs 9.99 a month if you don't get it through one of their included plans. The Voyager uses an updated version of Vznavigator which has a new menu system, but it's essentially the same old program. You can use Vznavigator with the phone closed! On top of that it's a fairly handy program however, as it lets you bookmark saved locations so you can navigate to them again. It even lets you send a location to another buddy with Vznavigator... so say you want to meet somewhere and he doesn't know how to get there. Send him your location and he can navigate to you. It's very handy. I do not want to give you the wrong impressions though, I am pretty happy with Vznavigator. I've never had a problem getting directions (Except for my road trip to the backwoods of Arkansas) and they seem accurate and efficient. I am also a big fan of the Vznavigator's local search, which lets you search for gas stations, retaurants, airports, just about ANYTHING and it find something close to your GPS location and navigate you there. Is this a required feature though? Nah. If you've got a dedicated GPS device, you'll see how simplistic this thing is and you'll just be wasting your money. It should be noted that the Vznavigator software is PRELOADED onto the Voyager. I don't know if you can remove it, but you want to make sure you aren't being charged per month when you get your phone and you don't want it.

(( Music & TV ))

The music player in the Voyager has been given a facelift. When it comes right down to it, V-Cast Music is simply another in a long list of music services (most of them overpriced, and Verizon is no exception) – You can download most any song for 1.99, some for free. It should be noted that any song you download here will have DRM and so they can't be transferred to your computer without the appropriate Verizon software (software that, might I add, is more a reskinned version of Windows Media Player than anything)

All that aside, the music player is adequate but suffers from a VITAL flaw. You cannot listen to music while you do other things on this phone. Oddly enough this feature was included in both the LG Chocolate and the LG Venus, but not the Voyager. This means that if you're listening to music, you're pretty much not doing anything else. If a message/instant message/ or other alert comes in, the music stops, and lets you reply to the message, then picks up where it left off. There is no way to check your inbox or do anything else whatesoever. Even working with some of the menus in Vcast will stop the music. This kinda hurts the music capabilities of this phone, but as a music player it is perfectly functional. I've used it on airports and in the car all the time, and it can play your music collection fairly well. You can transfer your music to the phone but you're going to want a memory card of some kind. The system memory is simply inadequate for power users. Whatever you do, do not buy a memory card from the Verizon store. They charged me almost 39.99 for a 1 gig microSD card back in the day. Shop around, you can find these things for much cheaper elsewhere. This rule pretty much applies to anything at the Verizon store, you can probably find it cheaper elsewhere.

And last but not least, the Mobile TV... it's hard for me to really review it because I don't get TV coverage in Houston. It looks nifty though. What I have noticed however is that video playback on the Voyager can be hit or miss. The free streaming videos you get off of Vcast, even the trailers, aren't particularly high quality at all... in fact I can't imagine paying for any of these V-Cast videos. The LG voyager seems to like the .3GP format, so I'm currently experimenting with DVDrips. I recently made a very nice rip of 3:10 to Yuma for the LG Voyager and it came out pretty well on the Voyager's big screen, with minimal artifacts or distortion. However the lack of organization in the phone's management of videos is somewhat annoying. It's impossible to make folders and sort recorded videos at all, so you'll essentially just given one big folder and have to scroll to find everything.

(( Mobile IM ))

The LG Voyager has a Mobile IM capability via their application - It's a fairly simplistic IM program, that basically counts instant messages as text messages. That means that anything you IM to people will be counted as a text message and billed as such. If you plan on using Mobile IM a lot, you're gonna need an messaging package of some kind in order to avoid getting screwed royally. My only complaint with the Mobile IM program is that it doesn't support any other medium other than MSN, AIM, and Yahoo, and that the current version of the Mobile IM program for the Voyager is the 2.X version, whereas the EnV uses the 3.X version. Why they wouldn't upgrade the Mobile IM on such a new device is beyond me, and I'm hoping they update the program soon. The IM program can run in the background while you do other stuff, and essentially pops up an alert when you receive an IM.

(( Bluetooth ))

The phone supports bluetooth and all those bluetooth headsets and whatnot. I have not had a change to experiment with it very much, but I'm currently looking into bluetooth headsets. Obviously if you're running the bluetooth, you're killing your already short battery life, so use with care.

(( E-mail ))

The E-mail functionality of the Voyager is not built-in. You have basically one of two options when you get the phone. Get their 19.99 a month wireless sync service which syncs your e-mail box on a regular basis automatically (this feature, as the VZW rep told me, was geared more to business professionals) or you can use their Mobile E-mail program which is included in their Premium rate plan. On the Mobile E-mail program, which is the only one I've ever used, you can check your Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, AIM, or any other of common webmails or even POP3 accounts. It's a fairly handy program, but again, it's simplified... advanced e-mail features or anything like that are simply not there. If you are anything more than a casual user, you probably want a Smartphone for your e-mail.

(( Battery Life ))

They say you get 4 hours of talk time on the Voyager, but I don't know how they came up with that estimate. Realistically, you will get about a day's use out of it before you need to recharge. Doing things like browsing, gaming, or music will kill your battery life fairly quickly. If you really need more battery life you'd be best to invest in the extended battery. It's about 30-40 bucks last I checked. I don't own one so I can't really comment on how well it performs. All I do know is that the larger battery will add weight and probably detract from the sleekness of the phone. All I can say is make sure you have a charger handy or a car adapter if you need it, because this phone can and will die on you if you forget about it. It's not one of those phones than can run at 1 bar forever and ever, like some seem to. It's a battery hog any way you cut it.

(( Games ))

The Voyager has access to the Get it Now games from Verizon's service but most, if not all, of the games are pretty lame. A lot of the games that were compatible with the EnV are not compatible with the Voyager, (Castlevania for example) - This doesn't just go for games either. A lot of the applications like Mobile Banking and stuff that worked for the EnV are not available for this phone. That may change in the future, but for the most part the Voyager has slim pickings when it comes to games. The phone is completely locked down so don't expect to download games and put them on this thing. It should also be noted that the Bluetooth on this device is also locked down. You cannot send ringtones, files, or a bunch of other things.

(( Conclusion ))

In conclusion the LG Voyager is what can be best described as a jack of all trades, but a master of none. You've got many features that smartphones have, but you have to remember that this is not a smartphone. The Voyager is a sleek multimedia phone that improves greatly on the EnV – it's an all around improvement. However this phone is definitely not an iphone killer, by any stretch. It is however one of the best messaging/multimedia handsets that I've used. All it's shortcomings aside, I'm happy with what this phone does and am eager to push it to the limits and see what it can (can can't) do.

Posted by: Toad248

I love it but its no Windows mobile phone .......:0

Posted by: Kent-45

My sentiments exactly. Those expecting the functionality and polish of a Windows Mobile smartphone will be sadly disappointed.

I'm currently looking at the Samsung I760 or the XV6800 as my next handset. The Voyager can only give you a taste of what a smartphone can do, it will leave you wanting more.