Hands-on with Verizon's new fall lineup

Filed under: Handsets, Features, LG, Samsung


We got to spend a little alone time with each of Verizon's new phones for the holidays, and we found plenty to like. We started out with the Samsung Juke, which is meant as an entry level music device. There's no EV-DO on board, and therefore no V CAST Music Store, but as a "phone that happens to be a low-end 2GB DAP," it should do just nicely, and A2DP is always nice. We could go for a stronger spring action flick motion, and when open the phone seems quite awkwardly long, but it's all solid and usable enough. The Pearl is just a Pearl, so we'll move on. The LG Venus has quite an interesting interface, that we suppose will be a love it or hate it affair. There's adjustable vibration feedback to your finger presses on the bottom touchscreen, but unfortunately you can't adjust screen sensitivity, and we had sometimes had trouble with getting the beta hardware Verizon was showing us to register our finger presses. Otherwise the phone is a thing of beauty, and has one of the best looking UIs we've seen from the likes of Verizon and LG. The camera interface is particularly polished, with options galore and some interesting usage of the touch screen for cropping and sending pics. Finally we have the LG Voyager. In most objective senses, the phone is pretty dang large, but somehow it's easier to overlook that fact when you're staring at dual screens and an immense QWERTY keyboard. The screen was quite responsive to our button presses, and there was no lag between using an app in touchscreen mode and opening up the phone for a QWERTY session. The HTML browser leaves a little to be desired -- after taking ages to load a fractured form of Engadget, we couldn't hardly scroll down it to save our life -- and it's pretty clear that the Voyager is less a smartphone out of the box than the iPhone is, despite its marvelous keyboard, but there's certainly a lot of potential.

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