LG Voyager Cell Phone Review
By Mark Brezinski
Reviewed.com Editorial Staff
Published on December 21, 2007
We can imagine most people getting the same initial impression we did when looking at the LG Voyager: this is one impressive-looking smart phone. The former part of this statement is true. It has a large 2.81-inch external touch screen and opens up to reveal a second 2.81-inch internal screen and a full QWERTY keyboard. The phone, however, is no business device. We wouldn't call it a fashion phone either, because while it looks impressive, it isn't particularly pretty or sleek. What we will call it is an average phone in a package that's anything but. Unfortunately, this fancy presentation comes at a price: the phone is $299.99 with a two-year contract from Verizon.
Placing a call on the Voyager is a bit of a hassle, but we’ve noticed this as a theme on touch-screen phones; they don’t offer the tactile feedback of physical keypads that makes for quick dialling. The Voyager wasn't as slow as the HTC Touch, but the iPhone is still the reigning champ of touch screen implementation; we were able to dial much quicker on the iPhone than on the Voyager. The Voyager has decent software for handling call history and a full set of call and data timers, but contacts and other organizational software contain nothing beyond the basic functions; don’t expect to be able to use it to organize your schedule if you need to divide business from personal tasks, for instance.
The Voyager had good audio quality. We had no complaints about how the Voyager represented the user's voice, which was captured and transmitted faithfully by the device. Incoming callers' voices aren't handled with as much care; lower frequencies are slightly overemphasized, meaning they might sound somewhat bassy and boomy. But these are minor issues; mostly the Voyager sounded good.
The camera wasn’t that good, though. We found still capture was a slow process, and the results weren’t pretty; colors were undersaturated (so they looked overly pale) and there wasn’t much detail in images. We liked both the camera and video interfaces, however, so as long as you are expecting to take casual snaps, you should be fine.
Media playback was also less than stellar. Verizon tends to have mediocre music and video players, and the Voyager is no exception. The V Cast software isn't so much interested in playing back your music as it is in selling you music from Verizon’s own store, while blasting your eyes with a bright shade of red whenever possible.
Software on the Voyager tends to be very basic. We liked the browser, which was a departure from Verizon's usual very basic offering. While it wasn't better than other advanced browsers, it offered more functionality, including displaying web pages as they would appear on a desktop web browser. The software was far weaker in other areas, especially messaging as the phone didn't provide an email client. Instead, you have to rely on web-based email services, which seems like an odd choice on a phone with a decent QWERTY keyboard built in. Fortunately, MMS and SMS messages were handled fairly well. Texting should be easy with the full QWERTY at your disposal.
Battery life on the Voyager was better than average. In our talk time test, the Voyager lasted a 4 hours and 33 minutes. Music playback time lasted a good hour above average with 9 hours and 40 minutes. Web browsing time was towards the head of the middle of the pack with a solid 4 hours, 21 minutes. All of these are decent scores, especially for a device with a large screen.
While we felt the Voyager was a good phone (as long as you know it only looks like a business device), we didn't feel it was worth its price. For $300 you could get an actual smart phone that has far better functionality both in terms of hardware and software, such as a BlackBerry 8820. If you're particularly taken by the Voyager, or don't mind its limited capabilities, we'd still recommend you wait for a price drop before picking one up.For a more in-depth review, visit the LG Voyager Review at our partner WirelessInfo.com
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