New Review Verizon LG Voyager Coffee House Test Review

This is a Coffee House Test Review where
we take the phone to our very hip local coffee house, show it to the
finest caffienated technophiles, answer their questions and report
their comments.

LG  Voyager from Verizon rated 4.5 out of 5 by the Coffee House Test Review by Wireless and Mobile News.

What does the LG Voyager feel like and how does it work?
The
LG Voyager  feels strong and looks classy. It’s got a nice metal
decoration around the edges and it’s not too heavy. You can operate it
from the front touch screen which is set to vibration feedback or the
interior screen with keyboard and navigation buttons. To switch from
the touch screen to keyed screen all you have to do is open the phone
and the screen appears on the inside. To move the menu items down on
the touchscreen, you brush your fingers up and the menu items move
down.

What’s the browsing like?
The
browsing on the LG Voyager is in landscape mode only and works
well. 
We didn’t get impatient with any our usual websites when the
keyboard was used. We had more difficulty typing in URLs with the
touchscreen
keyboard which had a nice feature of a “.com” key.  Wireless and
Mobile
News loaded fine, even with all its graphics, you have the choice of
Web screen optimized, text only and full html from either the front
touchscreen or interior screen. The screen resolution is 400 x 240
pixels. You can zoom in and out on either screen on the keyboard side
it is through the menu key.  In optimized mode at 100% you can
view 9
lines of text that equates to about 9 points high if the fonts were
printed on a page or at 200% it’s 8 lines of text at about 11 points
high if
it were printed text. There are four views 100%, 125%, 150% and 200%.
Menu functions have number shortcuts next
to them which are faster.

At th VZW Home Screen you can do a Web search or go to 
News, Sports, Weather, Entertainment, Optimized Web, Connect, have
Verizon account access or get help. This icons are numbered for easy keyboard access or they can be tapped on the touchscreen.

There were no problems loading and posting to Twitter but seeqpod did
not work because it requires the Adobe Flash Player. Although myspace
required a lot of finger scrolling we were able to finally login and
check email.

Can I check my Yahoo Mail and Gmail?
The LG Voyager has a ready
made Connect screen
to connect to Yahoo, Windows Live, Gmail
Aol Mail and Facebook. We accessed Yahoo mail and sent a message with
no trouble. The VZ “Get it Now” function allows you to get Mobile Email
access to “other” email services which may cost an additional fee
depending on your service plan.

Is the GPS worthwhile?
The
GPS simply put is a blast.  Once  the permissions were setup
it located
our exact office address with a map from which we did a local search
that verified that THE coffee house is 3.5 miles away.  It then
spoke exact
turn by turn directions. The Verizon Navigator service offered to send
a text message regarding the location with an estimated arrival time of
8 minutes. It will also create a “follow-me map” which shows the route
you are traveling on  the map, this is fun but dangerous
while driving. Monthly access costs $9.99 a month and daily access is $2.99.  Another nice feature
that is not currently available would be if we could place a call
directly to the mapped location.

Does the LG Voyager display YouTube?
There
is a direct access icon via the Entertainment button to YouTube Mobile
with a data use warning. A music video was slower loading than webpages
it took 8 seconds to load. Google Maps defaulted to the mobile version.

How are the phone calling features?
Great, we called people solely with voice activation with no problems.
The voice activation voice was female warm and friendly(or you have a
choice of three other characters.)  It would call to a name said
and distinguish between home or mobile.  The phone
quality was excellent.

How’s the Mobile TV?
This is were the screen is at its best, it is a lot better than any
YouTube or Web video and is mobile optimized. The image does jump once
in a while.

What about Battery Life?
Pretty good, yesterday, with a full charge, the LG Voyager was powered
on from 10:00 am to 7:00 pm and the battery went from 4 bars to 2 bars
with about  3.5  hours of Internet access. IHowever, after using the camera and video camera, power was used faster. It’s rated for up
to 240 minutes usage time and up to 480 hours standby time.

Music compatibility?
You can sync music from PC to phone via V CAST Music Manager which will will only work with V CAST Music Manager, Windows Media Player 10 (or higher) on the Windows XP (or higher) operating system. Mac OS is not supported. You can also drag and drop music to the microSD card.

How does it compare to the iPhone?
This question is so intense it is answered in a separate Review of Reviews iPhone vs Voyager.

Hows the camera?
The camera is like playing a video game, it
fills the entire screen with a preview and has many adjustments. 
We had to play with a while before we  were able to get the best
shots.  It does not have a flash therefore light adjustment is
important. Here’s a photo from the coffee house.

Comments Heard
“Great keyboard.”  “I wish
the screen was just a little bigger.”  “Excellent phone
quality.”  “The opening and closing screen change is neat.” “The
call quality is better than my iPhone. I like the GPS, video, voice
commands, photo settings, TV and fast access but find the vibrations
distracting.  The Web browsing and camera are better on my
iPhone,” said an iPhone user.

Our test research
leads us to believe that the LG Voyager is packed with enough features
to keep most phone users with textaholic tendencies happy, but
won’t satisfy users who have “i” envy and must have Wi-Fi. We rate it
4.5 because it has almost everything but the kitchen sink including a
very usable keyboard (from which we could write a short story or review
in a pinch) music player, Web surfing, e-mail access, V CAST, mobile TV and GPS
navigation.

If you would like to see what other reviewers noticed about the LG Voyager  take a look at our LG Voyager (Verizon) LG VX10000 Review of Reviews.

The
LG Voyager was a lifesaver for an actor who needed to access his Yahoo
mail to get the phone number and address of an audition in
Hollywood.  He first tried to call his girlfriend to access his
computer, but she couldn’t do it. Through the connect function, he got
the address and then got the directions through GPS.  The only
thing the LG Voyager couldn’t do was get him the part…

We will continue answering your questions which you may post via comments.