LG Voyager Review

User Interface:

Voyager’s User Interface has been optimized for use with the external touch-screen, and works in similar fashion to the iPhone, but does not allow for multiple fingers and “pinching” of images and web pages. Menus and text are shown larger than average, so you can easily press on your desired selection. After few seconds of inactivity, the front screen will automatically lock to prevent any buttons from being accidentally pressed. You can unlock it by pressing the “lock” icon on the bottom of the display, or by using the manual sliding lock button on the left edge. Anytime that you press on the external screen, the phone will give a haptic vibration feedback and will play an audible tone.

Once the screen has been unlocked, you are given 4 icons at the bottom: Messages, Phone, Menu, and Contacts. You can also tap in the center of the screen to bring up a list of 12 shortcut icons. Unfortunately, these cannot be moved, replaced, or modified in any way; so you must deal with the ones that are pre-selected.

The Main Menus is divided into Get it Now, Messaging, Contacts, Recent Calls, Settings & Tools, Music, Browser, and Navigator. There are only two themes available (B&W and Color), but you can also select from a list of 5 menu fonts (VZW Font, LG Serif, Edge, Joy, and Script). There is also the ability to assign a specific wallpaper to each display, including pictures, videos, and animations, and also 6 different clock formats.

Using the external screen for simple one-touch input works fairly well, but when having to press & scroll through a menu list, we started to run into some problems. For example, the Settings & Tools menu has eleven selections in a list, but only 5 are shown at a time. You must press your finger down on the bottom of the screen and slide it upwards to scroll the list up. We found that this can take several attempts before it worked as it should, and often times it would think that we “clicked” an item, when in fact we were scrolling. This also holds true when moving through long lists of people stored in the Contacts menu. Because of these quirks, we decided to give the internal screen and d-pad a try. After several minutes, we found that using the d-pad to be much faster for menu navigation than using the touch-screen. This however takes away from the “cool” factor, so individuals will have to decide for themselves which method they to use.


Phonebook:

Up to 1000 Contacts can be added by either the external touch display or by using the internal QWERTY keypad. For each one you can enter in their name, 5 phone numbers, E-Mail address, and can select a picture and ringtone. After a contact is saved, you can assign them to one of 98 speed dial locations. Retrieving a stored contact is easily done by pressing the green phonebook icon on the bottom of the screen. This brings all of them up in a list that you can scroll through, or you can press the tabbed letters at the top to show only contacts beginning with that specific letter. The last option is to press Go To, where you can type any part of a name (first or last) and have it search your stored list. When you receive an incoming call, and that person is stored in your list, the external display will show their Name and Number, as well as their Picture ID (if there is one), and will play their specific ringtone (if set). The only problem that we noticed is that Voyager shows Picture ID images very small, about ½” in size. We find this unexcitable on LG’s part, considering the large size of the screen. .

Taping on the Phone icon will bring up the numeric dial pad. Even though the numbers on the screen large, we found that often times we would misdial, and would have to clear and re-enter the phone number. After a while there were less mistakes, but it does take some time getting use to, since you are not pressing physical buttons.


Organizer:

The Calendar has had a face-lift since the enV, but still functions in similar fashion. It starts off by showing the current month with the date highlighted in red. From there, you can move forward or backwards one month at a time by pressing the left and right arrows at the top and can select a day of the week by using your finger. There is an option to allow you to view weekly instead of monthly, and to type in a specific date to go to. Once the correct date is selected, you can add a New Event with the Subject, Start Time, End Time, Repeat (once, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly), Until, Alerts (none, on time, 5 min, 10 min, 15 min, 1 hour, 2 hour, 1 day, 2 days), Tone, and Vibrate. When the phone reaches that saved event, it will display the information on the screen and playback the designated alert tone.

Separate from the calendar are three independent alarms, with each one allowing you to select the Set Time, Repeat (once, daily, mon-fri, weekends), and Ringtone. This is an easy way to setup a daily wake-up alarm, or notification if it takes place within 24 hours.


The speaker-independent Voice Command feature can be launched by pressing the Clear button located under the external display, or by going to the Shortcuts menu. Once activated, there are 7 choices that you can speak to the phone: Call name or number, Send Message to, Go to menu, Check item, Lookup name, My Account, and Help. The most useful of these is the “Call” command, where you can speak the digits to dial or the name of a person in your contacts list. The only training that is required are for the digits, not the names or commands. The system works best in quiet environments, but it was still able to understand our voice selection while used in a car traveling at highway speeds, and while in noisy mall. It can also be used in conjunction with a Bluetooth headset, so you can call numbers while you are away from the phone.

The Voyager has a total of 184MB of internal memory built-in. While this pales in comparison to the 2GB on the Samsung Juke, it is expandable through the use of the memory card slot, and can accept microSDHC cards currently up to 8GB in size. In doing so, the Voyager will have the same amount of storage space as the iPhone. There is also the possibility that the Voyager can use 16GB and 32GB microSDHC cards, but since those are not yet released, there is no way that we verify this.