The LG enV Touch is the new and improved successor to the Voyager though the enV still is the name. The name changed is due to a copyright issue with plantronics. In this new Voyager, the V Cast Mobile TV has been removed, but two high-resolution displays was included. This new floding mobile handset is come with a 3 inch external touch screen that when opened reveals another 3 inch display along with a full QWERTY keyboard, which make it more texting-friendly. Infosyncworld has vote this handset for 72% good, and here is the reason why they said that:
Design – Good
The LG enV Touch is a beefy clamshell phone with a large, 3-inch external touch screen and a similar 3-inch display on the inside. It opens sideways, and the extra width makes room for a full QWERTY keyboard within. The two displays really steal the show, but there’s a marked difference between them. The interior screen is not a touch screen, and it’s also a much darker, richer looking display. The external display had a plastic feel to it. It was somewhat dimmer, and it was disappointingly unresponsive during our tests. There was a noticeable screen door effect. Still, it was hard not to be impressed by the 800 by 480 pixel resolution on both displays.
Regardless of some wonky touch response, LG has once again tried to beef up Verizon Wireless’ interface design, like they did on the LG Voyager. There’s a pull-out drawer for favorite apps and even media file and Web browser shortcuts. There are pop-up menus and pull-down menus and menus that slide from side to side. There’s no real rhyme or reason to it, and the interface lacks the class of LG’s upscale S-Class interface design we’ve seen recently. Certainly it brings the best apps forward, with some room for customization, but the lack of touch response and the strange organization make the whole experience seem a bit more adventurous than you might wish for.
On the inside, the LG enV Touch really shines with a jumbo keyboard and an even better display. The menus aren’t quite as exciting since you can’t touch them, but almost every feature other than calling is improved by opening the clamshell. Beyond the QWERTY keys, we liked the roomy 4-way button on the right side that was placed right for gaming, as the shortcuts for jumping to our favorite contacts, or writing a new message. Users who are going to keep the LG enV Touch open most of the time will probably be the most satisfied with the design.
Messaging and Keyboard– Very Good
Verizon Wireless hasn’t done much to update some of the aging messaging apps we see on all their messaging phones, but we do welcome the addition of the Corporate E-mail app, as it adds some enhanced functionality across the board for business users. None of the messaging apps look pretty, but they are all sturdy, simple versions of their respective features. There is SMS messaging, and though it doesn’t quite offer threaded messaging, it does group messages together in a nice looking way. The Corporate E-mail app didn’t offer advanced functions, but it did give us access to our Exchange Inbox, as well as data for the contact list and calendar. Mobile E-mail didn’t have Gmail on its list of preset e-mail services, but it had no trouble downloading settings when we gave up our basic info. All in all a satisfying experience for the basic necessities, but nothing really special. As phones like the Palm Pre and some of HTC’s devices offer advanced access to Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, it’s time for these high-end messaging phones to embrace similar advanced access to these services, since this is what the audience craves.
The internal QWERTY keyboard on the LG enV Touch is nice and wide. The keys are discrete, nicely raised and rounded with a soft click to them. We’re not a fan of splitting the bottom row with the spacebar, and there seems to be enough room to perhaps squeeze in an additional row, but we’re not really complaining, because this keyboard was comfy as is. We were happy to find that, for the most part, the LG enV Touch is smart about opening and closing the clamshell for text entry. Opening and closing doesn’t always automatically quit an app like it does on some other clamshell QWERTY phones. You can almost always open for text entry then close when you’re done. We recommend this, as the touchscreen keyboard is pretty lousy. There are landscape and numeric versions, but the screen was so unresponsive, we found the touch keys frustrating. Some times, we would get a haptic vibration, an audible click and a visual cue that we had pressed the correct key, but nothing would happen, or the wrong letter would appear. Stick to the real keys, they’re a much better experience.
Multimedia – Very Good
As a music player, the LG enV Touch is okay, but nothing special. It managed to chew through all of our tracks, and the music player app itself was adequate. Even the touchscreen version was easy to handle, no need to open the phone this time. Tilt the phone on its side and you get a cover flow album spread, then you can zoom through your album covers using the arrows on screen. You can synchronize the phone with Windows Media Player or even Rhapsody subscription accounts, but we simply dropped MP3 tracks into the music folder on our microSD card. Once we got the folder name correct, the phone found them. The LG enV Touch also gets access to the V Cast Music store, but there was nothing special to report about this experience. It’s still slow, expensive and surprisingly wide in scope.
The video experience on the LG enV Touch was surprisingly good. We’ve been let down recently by high resolution phones when it comes to video playback. The LG enV Touch couldn’t quite live up to its full resolution potential, none of our 800 by 480 pixel videos would play properly on the phone, but the enV Touch handled VGA mp4 videos very nicely. Movie clips looked sharp and colorful, especially on the superior internal screen. Even stretched to fit the wider display, our videos looked great.
We wish the LG enV Touch had some better multimedia hardware on board. For one thing, with its tilted screen and flanking speakers, the enV Touch cries out for some serious loudspeaker sound, but instead it gets a pair of piddly little mobile speakers. There is a 3.5mm headphone jack, and of course the music sounded much better playing through our own cans. The phone can handle memory cards up to 16GB, but the device is large enough that surely LG could have slipped in a few GB of onboard storage? Perhaps in the space they saved by not including a mobile TV antenna?
Navigation – Very Good
The LG enV Touch uses VZ Navigator for turn by turn directions, and it gets a fairly advanced version of the navigation app. The phone found us quickly during our navigated route and it had no trouble tracking us through turns. When we got too far off course, it would simply give up and ask us to start over, but it loaded new directions quickly. There were also a slew of nice point-of-interest features to find movie times and local attractions. The app even worked well on the exterior touch screen, with large controls, but of course the maps looked better on the better interior display.
Camera – Good
Considering the features and specs on paper, we were hoping for better pictures from the 3.2-megapixel camera on the LG enV Touch. The phone offers a touch focus option, and we had fun trying to get this to work, but in the end most of our subjects were slightly blurry. Center focus was a little better, but under bright lighting the images were apt to overexpose. Panorama was fun to use, and the camera did a nice job stitching these together without an obvious seam.
Video recording on the LG enV Touch was pretty good. The phone can record VGA resolution videos. These were 3ivX-encoded, .3g2 files, an unusual but usable format. They didn’t look superb, videos wavered a bit, but looked better than on most average camraphones. The phone also has a fun photo browser. It’s a vertically spinning wheel of photos, and it reminded us of the wheel contestants spin to get onto the showcase showdown on “The Price is Right.”
*This is only partial of the review, for full review please visit Infosyncworld.com
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