One of the most notable of the fallouts Apple iPhone launch last year is the growing trend of touch screen phones. LG was among the first manufacturers outside the door with phones like LG and LG Voyager Vu dazzling us with the characteristics that we could not get into iPhone, as well as live TV and mobile connectivity 3G. Samsung then came the fiery instinct, a phone that directly targets iPhone with visual voice mail, integrated GPS, and businesses via e-mail. However, many of these phones still walking on familiar ground with its design and features.
LG the latest handset, however, dares to take things in a different direction. The appropriately named Dare LG presents a bit of ingenuity we have not seen before on the touch screen phone sex. For example, you can drag and drop icons to make your own custom shortcuts on the home screen, or you can use a drawing pad to sketch out ideas or draw a map, which can then be sent via MMS to a friend. The Dare also has one of the most advanced cameras we’ve seen in a touch screen phone – its 3.2-megapixel camera has settings like face detection, noise reduction, panoramic photo stitching, and a SmartPic technology designed to take pictures in low light. The built-in video camera can record even high-speed video and play it in slow motion, which is the first camera to U.S. phones. By the way, I would not call this a murderer iPhone, as it has no features such as Wi-Fi, and its Web browser and media player are not as good. However, Dare is a very attractive alternative for Verizon customers who want a touch screen phone with a difference. The LG Dare is competitively priced at $ 199 U.S. dollars after a 50 mail-in rebate and a two-year service agreement.
Design
Like all touch-screen phones, the LG Dare design is dominated by a large screen that covers almost all the front surface of the phone. In fact, the only visible keys on the front are the call, Clear / voice command, and End / Power keys at the bottom. The Dare is a bit smaller than the iPhone and Samsung Instinct, measuring only 4.1 inches long by 2.2 inches wide by 0.5 inches thick. It has a stainless steel border along its sides, black and a soft touch surface at the rear that gives a good grip on the hand. It weighs about 3.76 ounces, which gives a light yet solid feel.
The smaller of the Dare also results in a smaller space for the 3-inch wide-screen (compared to more than 4 inches to sample the other two phones). Even though that was fine with most applications, we will admit that dissuades us from enjoying the full HTML browser (which we’ll section), because it means we have to do more than usual displacement . The screen supports 262000 colors and 240×400 pixels resolution, resulting in an impressive display with vibrant and colourful graphics and clean text. You can adjust the backlighting time, the menu of sources, the dial of sources, the display theme, and even the image of the screen cargo. You can also choose animated wallpaper if you wish.
Along the bottom row of the screen of the home screen are five shortcut icons for mail in-box, the phone interface, the main menu, the agenda, and a menu of favorites (which is a customizable design figure of up to nine favorite contacts). There is also a small arrow icon on the far right of the screen (approximately one third of the way down), which leads to a list of 11 shortcuts that you can select from 51 possible applications. You can drag and drop icons such direct access to change the order in which they appear. However, the coldest thing is that you can also drag and drop directly to the home screen. Simply tap an icon and drag it toward the home screen, and let go. You can then arrange the icons anywhere in your home screen as well.
Returning to the favourites menu, not only you have a graphic design of your favorite contacts, but can also drag and drop around the screen. After selecting a contact, can have instant access to a new text message or a phone call immediately. You can also modify their contact information in the field.
Another innovative aspect of Dare on the touch screen is the option of "scattered" menu interface design. You can then drag and drop icons dispersal to new positions on the menu. We found that this is quite fun and intuitive, but can not stop thinking is rather unnecessary. We would have been equally happy with the traditional grid menu design (which is a menu option style as well). Throughout the menu interface, you’ll see an arrow back in the top left, which takes you back to the previous screen, and a Start button, which brings you back to the home screen.
Like the instinct, Dare provides tactile feedback haptic, which gives tiny vibrations when tap on the screen. It is very useful when selecting menu options, as it provides a confirmation of natural selection. You can go through a wizard calibration to adjust the sensitivity to the screen, and can adjust the type of vibration (short, double, or long) and vibration level (low, medium, high, or out altogether) . You can also activate "the vibrations of arrows," which establishes beyond tiny vibrations arrows up and down lists. In fact, we recommend this, so you know that you are going through a list and not accidentally select something.
This leads us to touch the interface itself. Despite largely enjoyed the experience of tactile interface, we have to admit there is still a slight learning curve. They often select something senseless, especially when they move up and down lists or dragging the icons around. The touch interface is certainly more sensitive than we thought it would be, even after going through the calibration wizard. After a day or two of fiddling around with him, however, we have learned to adapt.
We found text messaging and dialing be quite easy, even with the touch screen interface. The phone interface is the standard numeric keypad, a voice command button, a button that lets you hand "writing" numbers instead of using the keyboard, plus two shortcuts to the recent call list and the list contacts. The keyboard features nice big numbers, and then finished marking, you can hit the green button or call, or physical button at the bottom left. There is also a key save to store the new telephone numbers. During a call, some icons appear shortcut to activate the speakerphone, call mute, send a text message, add a note, connect to a Bluetooth headset, and even voice recording.
There are several options for entering text messages. You can also use the virtual keyboard T9, or you can turn the phone 90 degrees in the right direction and a QWERTY keyboard will appear automatically. We are then able to tap each key with our thumbs. By touching each key to magnify a key moment, as in the iPhone. The keyboard has a space dedicated bar, button return period, and aliases (@) keys, plus a Shift button to switch between upper and other symbols. Unlike the iPhone, you can copy and paste text, simply highlighting with fingers and beating a Copy button. However, the Dare does not correct spelling.
Another method would be to enter text using handwriting, or a method of graffiti. The handwriting recognition works fairly well, but we had some problems with him. On the one hand, we had to change ways of maintaining between upper, lower case letters, numbers and symbols – was not smart enough to understand the characters on their own. In addition, it is much easier to HandWrit with a pencil, or if you have long nails – using only our power led to more mistakes.
The Dare also has a proximity sensor that will automatically turn off the LCD while in a call to prevent accidental overwriting touch input, similar to the iPhone. It also has a light sensor that automatically adjusts the brightness in order to conserve battery life. As mentioned earlier, Dare has an accelerometer that will rotate the screen 90 degrees sense for certain applications such as browser, text messaging keyboard, and other applications. To see the screen image and music player, the screen can be rotated 360 degrees.
To the left of the spine Dare is a key reserve, a microSD card slot, a key speaker, and a USB charging. At the top is a 3.5mm headphone jack, while the volume rocker and dedicated camera sit in the right column. At the rear of phone is the camera lens and flash LED. There is even self-portrait mirror.
Features
The Dare comes with a generous entry of the 1000 list of contacts with room in each entry for five numbers and two email addresses. You can also save calls to groups, and can link with one photo and one of 26 polyphonic ring tones. Other essential features include text and multimedia messaging, a vibrate mode, a loudspeaker, a calculator, a tip calculator, a calendar, alarm clock, stopwatch, world clock, and a notebook. More advanced features include full support Bluetooth A2DP stereo, the ability to use the phone as a modem, and file transfer. There are also mobile e-mail, mobile instant messaging, a USB mass storage mode, voice command and voice dialing, voice recording, and GPS functionality across Verizon VZ Navigator service. Mobile e-mail is limited to popular Web mail services like Hotmail, Yahoo, and AOL, so it is not as robust as using a smartphone.
A nice bonus feature in Dare is a drawing pad. This book allows you to sketch or draw a little Doodle rough map with a variety of sizes and colors pencil. You can then send this picture to friends via MMS if desired.
The Dare has a full HTML browser. It will not support Flash, but that’s fine for a phone like this. As mentioned earlier, you can rotate the phone to display the browser in landscape mode, making it enter a URL much easier through the QWERTY keyboard. However, experience browser is not nearly as clean as the Safari browser on the iPhone. Expansion of entry and exit is a pain – we had to use any of the onscreen controls or the volume keys to do so. Panning the browser page with your fingers took some time, as the screen slowly replied. Moreover, since the screen is small, often had to do a lot of displacement to see everything. Moreover, if the zoom to see the browser page in full screen mode, the text would be too small to read (The camera key can be used to view the full screen overview as well). You can mark pages, as well as URLs to send to friends via e-mail, which is a nice touch. However, the overall experience has left us cold, and almost prefer to opt for the lighter versions of mobile Web sites instead.
Of course, since Dare is in Verizon EV-DO network, Verizon also has access to services banda ancha V-shaped V CAST video and CastMusic. The V Cast video and V CAST Music experience is the same as other phones. However, the music player interface is quite improved over what we have seen before. There are icons of all direct access to Play, Shop, and Sync, which correspond to the playlist complete, the V CAST Music Store, and USB synchronization, respectively. The songs are automatically sorted by genre, artist and album, and settings include shuffle and repeat. When playing a song, you get the typical play, pause, shuttle and track controls, plus get to see album art too. There’s even a pseudo Cover Flow allowing film songs through moving your finger across the screen. The Dare also has something called the background music mode that lets you listen to music in the background while you do other things – music pauses for incoming calls, and when the call ends, the music will resume where you left off. The Dare has a microSD card slot that supports up to 8GB of additional storage.
Probably the best feature of Dare, however, lies in its 3.2-megapixel camera. You can take pictures in five resolutions (2048×1, 536, 1600×1, 200, 1280×960, 640×480 and 320×240), five white balance presets, five color effects, four ISO settings (ISO Auto, ISO 100, ISO 200, ISO 400), and six preset scenes. Other camera settings include spot or average photometry, multishot, three shutter sounds (with an option silent), autofocus, auto-timer, flash, and fired four different types (Normal, Panorama, Split, and Frame ). Even offers face detection to ensure the face of someone who is in focus and noise reduction, which reduces the amount of artifacts in an image. Most notable, however, is something called SmartPic technology, which improves the images with color of the face-off (called Smart Beauty), as well as compensation of light (called Smart Light) – especially in low light situations .
The Dare has an excellent certified Schneider-Kreuznach lens that promises excellent quality, and what it offers. Images awaits sharp, with accurate colors, and everything seemed in focus. After taking his picture, are presented with a series of images editing options such as zoom, rotations, cultivation, changing the contrast, sharpness, and erasing. You can even use your finger to doodle on the image, or edit frames, effects and stamps.
The built-in video camera is not too bad either. It is one of the first camera phones to record up to three resolutions (176×144, 320×240 and 640×240 VGA) – is only VGA format to store on the device, since MMS can not support files that big yet. You can record videos up to 470KB for MMS. Settings are similar to the still camera. Another option is the premium for the ability for high-speed video recording. You can record videos from 120 frames per second (fps) and then play again with 15fps slow motion. This is the first phone in the U.S. which has this feature. Video quality was surprisingly decent. The action movements expected blurred with some jerkiness, but it is not bad for a camera phone. You can cut more videos add effects fade as well.
You can customize the Dare with lots of wallpaper, graphics, sound, alert tones, and much more. The Dare does not come with any game, but you can download as well as more graphics and sounds through the web browser.
Performance
We tested the LG Dare in San Francisco using Verizon Wireless service. The call quality was absolutely excellent. Voices sounded loud and clear, with almost no static and echo. That callers said that it seemed that we were still in a cell phone, but other than that, there was no distortion. Even when we used the loudspeaker, callers said there was little or no difference in sound quality. In our view, callers sounded like a great good. Speaker quality is a bit tinny and hollow in the side, but could still hear them well. Also at the Dare couples with the Plantronics Discovery 925 Bluetooth headset without any problems.
We were very impressed with the EV-DO Rev A speeds. Web pages loaded in seconds, and took about one minute to download a song 1.5MB. V Cast videos uploaded without a lot of rebuffering, although the streaming video quality still waiting quite pixelated. The sound quality was very good too, and he has decent sound output, but we prefer to use a stereo headset instead.
The LG Dare has a rated battery life of 4.6 hours of talk time and 15 days of standby time. Our tests revealed a talk time of 4 hours and 57 minutes. According to FCC radiation tests, the LG Dare has a digital SAR rating of 1.09 watts per kilogram.