Touchscreen phone comparison Q3 - U.S. carriers

GPS:

More and more customers are turning to their phone for driving directions rather than a separate GPS unit. The Vu, unfortunately, is not compatible with AT&T’s navigator service. The iPhone currently only has Google Maps, though Telenav has announced they intend to bring their services to the iPhone. For now though, users cannot get voice-guided navigation on their device.

The Dare offers VZNavigator, perhaps the worst GPS navigation software you’ll ever use. The program isn’t particularly hard to use, it just isn’t good. The interface is clunky and ported from the red-bar UI, and we often had a scroll bar on the right side indicating that there were more options, but we couldn’t scroll either with the bar or via the normal grab and flick method. Users do get voice-guided turn-by-turn directions however, so it’s a major upgrade from the iPhone.

The Instinct is without a doubt the best mobile GPS experience we’ve had. Telenav is a wonderful program that goes well beyond simple driving directions by letting the user search for nearby businesses, gas prices, Wi-Fi hotspots, ATMs, and anything from tattoo parlors to dry cleaners. To say it was comprehensive is selling it short. While we wish it could go widescreen, the GPS directions look fantastic on the Instinct’s large screen. The coup de grâce is the Instinct’s Speech to Action function, which allows the user to open Live Search with their voice, speak to search for a nearby business and with one click be taken to a navigation session.

Rating: Instinct 5, Dare 4, iPhone 2, Vu 1





Performance:

So it’s great that you can watch a movie and download music and get baseball updates on your device, but at the end of the day if it doesn’t perform as a phone than you just have a UMPC, and a rather poor one at that. So, how do the four stack up?

We realize reception will vary greatly around the country, but we live in top 15 metro area and tested the phones where all four phones had strong coverage. Using our seasoned test subject, we were told that the Instinct sounded the best, like a “landline” a “10 of 10.” The iPhone was close behind at a “9.5,” but sounded “a little more hollow.” The Dare was “7 or 6, a little distant and garbled at times.” Rounding out the four was the Vu, which sounded “a little hollow, the worst of the four. It sounds like a cell phone with lots of hum” in the background, especially during moments of silence.

On our end the results were similar. The caller sounded significantly better on the Instinct than any other phone, with the iPhone coming in a relatively close second. The caller sounded distant on both the Vu and Dare; on the former they sounded thin and they sounded hollow on the latter. The Vu was slightly better than the Dare, but both were well behind the sound quality of the Instinct and iPhone.

We had some reception issues with the iPhone. There were several times we were not able to place a call, and it would drop calls from time to time. The signal indicator on the Instinct fluctuated wildly, often jumping from one to six bars, but despite this we never had a problem making or holding a call, and call quality did not suffer.

The iPhone won the battery test at 8:40 of 2G talk time, though that fell short of its claimed 10 hours. The Dare was next, at 6:11 which represents a one third increase over its claimed 4:40. The Vu was third with 5:30 of talk time and the Instinct last at 3:30. However, the Instinct comes with two batteries and a battery only charger, so the phone really never needs to be plugged in.

Rating: Instinct 5, iPhone 4, Dare 3, Vu 2.5


Miscellaneous:

Of course not every feature is going to fall neatly into our previous categories. While the devices aren’t exactly going head-to-head here, they are rated on what they bring to the table. If the phones were potential NFL draftees, these would be their intangibles.

First up is a very tangible number: price. The Instinct is the most affordable phone, at just $129. The 8GB iPhone and Dare are $199, and the Vu and 16GB iPhone ring in at $299. As far as value goes, the Instinct is pretty hard to beat.

Despite its low price, the Instinct includes the most accessories in the box. The user gets a 2GB microSD card, 2 batteries and a battery only charger, USB data cable, stereo headphones, leather pouch, stylus and of course the AC adapter. The iPhone includes stereo headphones and the USB cable, which doubles as the AC charger with the included adapter. The Vu gives the user stereo headphones and the AC adapter, and the Dare simply an AC adapter, though at launch Verizon ran a promotion where new activations set up online received a free 8GB microSD card.

The aforementioned Speech to Action on the Instinct is a logical extension of prior speech recognition programs. It is powered by VoiceSignal, which has long allowed you to open programs with your voice. Opening the camera, for instance, wasn’t all that useful though. Now the user can open relevant items, such as weather, news, sports, movies and most importantly Live Search, in addition to the standard voice dialing services. For those not familiar with Sprint phones, Live Search is a local business search application which allows the user to search via voice, and utilizes the phone’s GPS capabilities to deliver local results.

The Dare and Vu (we seem to be saying this a lot) both feature a more standard voice command program. The iPhone, however, comes up short and does not offer voice command of any sort.

The iPhone’s App Store means that developers can finally take advantage of the platform and bring to market games, applications and business tools for users. We wouldn’t exactly call it open, Sling will testify to that, but it represents a new direction for the iron-fisted Steve Jobs. The Instinct runs on an open Java/BREW platform, and Sprint has created a Developer Program for it, but we have yet to see anything come of it.

There are iPhone issues galore, and right now the software is quite frankly unstable. We’ve experienced everything from slight menu lag to temporary unresponsiveness to lock-ups and even had some unexpected restarts. On our demo unit the screen shrunk after the first week of use; no longer does the display take up the whole LCD, there are several rows of unused pixels on the left and top sides, a few on the bottom and one or two rows on the right. The view is the same however, it’s not like the pixels are dead, just the view is shrunk. There are countless reports of unstable App performance, MobileMe failures, SIM issues, lost data and more. When it’s working properly it’s great, but right now the iPhone 3G isn’t worth the headaches it is causing.

The Dare and Vu are much more clean-cut. As we covered in the interface section the Dare has some nice UI enhancements, but both phones are paper tigers to some degree. Their spec sheets and feature lists look impressive, and to an extent are, but they lack the experience that the iPhone and Instinct give. It’s cool to use those devices, and the LGs just don’t have “it.”

Rating: Instinct 5, Dare 3, Vu 3, iPhone 2.5