LG Venus Review

User Interface

The Venus receives a unique flash-based skin for the user interface, a common practice for higher end Verizon devices. In this case there are two variants, Venus Black and Venus Color, and the six main menu icons are listed horizontally with a beam of red energy flowing through the highlighted selection. In the black theme the icons are actually white, and color in the color theme. Both offer a black background, making for a high contrast menu that is easy to read. Sub menus are black with white text, and the selection is highlighted with a red bar. Also available is the classic Verizon layout. We don’t want to say that the menu lags all the time, but at times it suffers from slow response. We have a feeling this may be due to the touch pad since the Verizon UI is normally very smooth.

While the design may be new, it is still the same Dashboard UI found on any other device. The menu items, in order, are My Music, Get it Now, Messaging, Contacts, Recent Calls and Settings and Tools. From the idle screen the user has five options on the touch pad, Message, Contacts, All Calls, Shortcuts and Menu. The Shortcuts button brings up five user assignable shortcut on the touch pad, making it easy to get where you’re going with minimal clicks. While it does offer an additional shortcut, most phones allow you to set the four d-pad directional keys as shortcuts so this is hardly unique.

This lack of creativity is our main concern with the Venus, and there is nothing truly unique here. The touch interface is different, but it does not offer any competitive advantage over previous designs. In general, the touch display acts as a left and right soft key, five way directional pad and back button...just like almost every other phone on the market. While there is a space for a fourth button, it is rarely used and most of the time just takes the place of a button typically found on a physical keypad.

Further compounding this issue is that the touchpad doesn’t always work properly. The display does offer vibrating feedback and a button animation to let the user know a selection has been made, but there have been several times when we feel the feedback and see the animation, yet the device does nothing. There are no sensitivity settings, but it is not a matter of the device not registering the press since the feedback, both visual and mechanical, is given. Needless to say, this gets frustrating.

Taking it even further the mix of touch/normal display sometimes throws the user off. While we know very well that the main display is not touch sensitive, we often found ourselves trying to tap on it to make a selection from various lists or web links. In the day and age of the iPhone, which LG is clearly trying to capitalize off of with the Voyager and to a lesser extent the Venus, users are more and more accustomed to touch screens. The mix on the Venus is really nothing more than a tease, especially considering the limited functionality of the touch display.


Phonebook

The phonebook is pretty standard on the Venus. There is room for a generous 1,000 contacts, each can store 5 numbers and 2 email addresses, can be assigned to a group and have a unique ringtone and picture ID. Groups cannot be created, so the user must choose between Business, Colleagues, Family, Friends, School or no group. Contacts are sorted alphabetically by full name, there is not a separate field for first and last names.







Organizer

The Calendar is also relatively vanilla on the Venus. Appointments are pretty basic; the only “advanced” option is to set a recurring appointment. They can only be created on the phone since there is no option to sync your calendar with a PC or website. There is a notepad, but no task list available.