The browser on the u740 works. I moved from a Motorola Q to this phone primarily because the Q reboots sometimes for the oddest reasons. After going through a lot of usage, I finally decided the Q just wasn't worth the extra $50/month to Verizon and I missed having access to VCast videos. The Q's browser had a lot of nice features, like highlighting phone numbers so you can call them and such.
The u740's browser can access any URL, but entering them on the phone, even with the keypad is not convenient. The favorites list is quite useful, and somehow the favorites I'd setup on my VX8100 managed to be retained on my u740, regardless of my MotoQ adventure.
The browser is able to view most pages I visit - I like to read slashdot when I'm eating lunch out, and it works okay for this, aside from a few annoyances.
First of these annoyances is the scroll button - or lack thereof. With most browsers you'd expect to press and hold the down button, but this is not the case with the u740 - you must press the down button for each line. When I read Slashdot, as you may well imagine, on that narrow screen, there's more than a hundred lines of text, and I need to press the down arrow to reach every one of them.
This leads to my next annoyance with the u740 - limited screen controls in the browser. Right now my eyes are still good, and reading web content doesn't require full-size fonts like the ones my parents would use, but the u740's font controls are very limited - I'd love to find a hack for this browser to let me reduce the font size to something like a 9-point or perhaps even an 8-point font. Right now, the browser is using a font roughly equivalent to an arial 11 point, which is plenty readable, but with a maximum of 30 characters across, well, it gets tough.
The browser doesn't support any java controls, but does scale graphics down to fit nicely on the tiny screen. The browser only works in "wide mode" also, which is not that bad of a thing with this phone.
To the u740's benefit, above all the other options, this phone does appear to have the fastest response time of any LG or Motorola phone in the Verizon line up. When I go to the camera, it gets there fast. When I snap a photo, it takes it fast. When I save that photo, as long as it's saved in the phone and not the 1gb memory card I plugged in, it saves it fast. For some reason, the same actions on the LG phones take longer, and the Moto Razr phones are slower than molasses on a cold day. These speed issues probably don't exist on these phones with other vendors, but Verizon has their own menu structure that they impose on all the phones they sell, and this menu structure seems to not appreciate the LG and Moto's much.
This same speed applies to VCast, music playing and other features as well. With this phone, I feel like I'm not moving fast enough with it, while it's keeping up with my plenty fine.
As for the form of the phone, it's pretty tough - I've already dropped mine once and dinged a corner, but it's still working strong. If you're a Verizon fan, and enjoy a decent phone, you'll like the u740 - but don't base everything on the browser alone, or you might pass on good phone.
The browser can access https or http sites of any type - the sales people at the stores presented it as limited, but that's when you compare it to the IE browsers in smartphones, and frankly, those are limited too. The limitations are mostly things like "no super-easy to access URL line" and "no small fonts in the browser window", but beyond that, it works fine.
Cheers!
Linear Mode
