Taking a Look at the LG enV Touch VX11000: Phone Review

The LG enV has made a steady, progressive evolution throughout its existence and has served Verizon Wireless well.  It has always been a powerful messaging machine with the ever  loving music playing capabilities.  Now LG decides to have the enV join the touch-screen phenomenon with the LG enV Touch VX11000.  They didn’t betray the QWERTY loyalists, a smart move, and kept the keyboard while giving the user the option of using the touch-screen for the situations that make it too inconvenient to open up the phone.  They’ve done well with the display and kept its multi-media and messaging stature but there are a few shortcomings in regards to its lack of ability to connect to social networking sites and less than optimal browsing.  Let’s take a look-see at what this phone has to offer.

Compliments: Display with great resolution; kept its useful assortment of multi-media and messaging features; Keyboard – enough said; 3.2 mega-pixel camera; HTML Web browser – but nothing comparable to smartphone standards.

Complaints: Web browser, although fully HTML capable, isn’t a smooth sail; too easy to accidentally access the phone and start calling and messaging people from inside your pocket, even with the display lock on; no Wi-Fi !?!; why couldn’t they just make this into a smartphone?

Style and Design

This phone, as smooth and glossy as it shines in the sun, is a cow of a phone.  The outer and inner displays are both 3 inches with a full QWERTY keyboard that adds to the bulkiness when opened.  The outer display is the touch-screen while the inner isn’t.  There is a difference of qualities between the two with the inner being a bit better; however, both are more than adequate at 800 x 480 pixels of resolution, supporting 1.6 million colors.

The official size is 4.52’ x 2.6” x 0.66”.  The weight is a hunky 4.92 oz.  The front of the phone is primarily the touch-screen display with the exception of the Send, Clear, and Power/End keys at the bottom.

The interface could have been designed more tactfully but still compares better than others.  It’s all a matter of preference and application usage anyway.  Access to applications is available through a pull-out drawer, pop-up and pull-down menus, and shortcuts to the media file and Web browser.  It’s a bit more complicated than we would like to experience.  Who needs a simple life?

The touch is simple enough.  The LG enV Touch has a calibration wizard that helps adjust the precision and sensitivity.  The phone also has a sound and vibrating haptic feedback that lets you know the touch registered.  This vibrations sensitivity and length can also be adjusted.

The menus can be played with through tapping and dragging of the finger – or fingers if you want to get fancy.  Being a touch-screen, the phone does take some adjusting to fit personal preference and practice to keep from hitting the wrong icons and scrolling like a drunken sailor.  With the any new phone, getting use to by playing with the phone is what makes getting a new phone fun.

Also accessible through the touch-screen is a landscape virtual QWERTY keyboard, T9 alphanumeric keypad, handwriting recognition, or multi-tap.  The QWERTY can be activated by using the internal accelerometer; rotating the phone horizontally activates the QWERTY.

The clamshell opens to what the enV has always been about.  LG really kept their smarts when they made their decision to restrain from having this phone be a touch-only phone.  If there was one person who made this suggestion, that individual deserves the Nobel Prize .

The Nobel should also go out to that person who added the 4-way button on the right side of the keyboard that can be used to access a new message, gaming, or accessing favorite contacts.  Actually, the more I use the keyboard the more I realize that the touch-screen is only for relishing in the fascination of touch-technology.

The left spine of the enV Touch holds the dedicated camera key, volume rocker, and screen lock key.  The right spine sits the microSD card slot and the 3.5 millimeter headset jack – a feature that should be standard by now!  The bottom houses the charger jack.  The back has the 3.2 mega-pixel camera with an impressive LED flash.

Battery and Memory

The enV Touch comes with a 950mAh battery that gives from 4.5 and up to 5 hours of talk time or 17 days of standby time after fully charged.

The phone supports memory card up to 16GB

Camera

What are two measly mega-pixels going to do for you?  It’s going to give you pictures that are mediocre.  The technology has been around for better cameras to be put onto cell phones and there is absolutely no excuse to have at least 3 mega-pixels.  Perhaps LG is taking note and the enV Touch VX11000 is equipped with a 3.2 mega-pixel autofocus camera.  The lens is a fancy Schneider-Kreuznach and the flash is not just a flash but a LED flash.

The autofocus can be set to Auto, Macro, and Manual.  The Auto focus isn’t that slow, just a bit over a second.  The whole picture taking process of focusing, taking the picture, and saving shouldn’t take any more than 7 seconds.

The quality of the images is as good as any other phone of its camera class.  The detail is clear, the picture is crisp.  The enV Touch’s camera comes with features such as Panorama Mode, smart de-noise, dynamic lights, Smile Mode, Facial Makeover, and Intelligent Shot.

Internet

The LG enV Touch uses the Obigo browser which can be accessed using a touch interface on the outer display.  The speed is quick and responsive.  The browser links and icons reacted well to the fingertips and the existence of resizing and zooming buttons made the experience a bit easier.  The browser does support Flash Lite, a nice surprise.  Some of the major sites could only be viewed in the mobile version and not their regular mode.

YouTube can be viewed from the browser page but doesn’t look all too well.  As long as you remember that you’re browsing the internet from the palm of your hand you just might get over the lack of video quality.  Aside from the lack of quality – I mean it’s still viewable – the video never crashed or froze up the browser.

Media

This is no iPod but plays music fairly decently, with headphones of course.  They saved their asses when they included the 3.5mm headphone jack because the speakers are like tiny mice singing.  Rhapsody and Windows Media Player subscriptions and be synchronized with the enV Touch.  MP3 and other music format work just as well too.  Accessing the music is where the touch-screen serves its purpose well.  Tilting the phone to the side displays a spread of album covers that can be scrolled through by the use of arrows.  The V Cast Music store is obviously accessible but not worth any more mention than saying it is expensive.

The video also took advantage of the quality of the displays.  Videos are supported for resolutions up to about 700 x 300 and rates of 1500kbps.   DivX and XviD videos are not supported. MediaFLO network streaming videos were displayed with nice picture and sound.

Messaging

The LG enV Touch VX11000 kept the enV line’s reputation of a messaging powerhouse intact.  The QWERTY keyboard is one of the main features people love about the original V and the other enV editions.  Touch is great but so is electricity, so what will happen when the plug gets pulled and you don’t have any generator to back you up?  The QWERTY is that backup.  Of course, I have the feeling that people will use the QWERTY keyboard over the touch features for sending messages.

Along with the standard text, SMS messaging, picture-text, and video-text, the enV Touch does pretty well for Mobile Email.  You can receive messages through Mobile IM and a POP or IMAP account.  AIM, Windows Live, and Yahoo are all supported.  It would’ve been nice to see Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter as part of the social networking phone features but it would’ve also been nice to see this phone as an all out smartphone.  As the said social network portals sets even deeper in our social psyche, LG better catch on for their next enV edition.

Verizon wireless adds Corporate E-mail app to this phone for business users who, regrettably,  chose not to go the BlackBerry, Palm Pre, or iPhone route – hey, cutbacks are painfully understandable.  There’s no fancy features, no high-tech functions going on.  However, your business email can be easily accessible once you input your information.

You may end up preferring to use the keyboard for all your messaging needs as the virtual keyboard on the touch-screen isn’t so user-friendly.  Messages that came out when I used the virtual keyboard are the equivalent as when I use to mumble badly as a child.

Calling

There is no hissing, no tunnel effect, no echoing.  The sound is loud, clear, and natural.  The speakerphone is loud and can be heard from across a room.  Reception, on the part of the phone, is adequate and any discrepancy will come from the network and not the phone.

The Gist of It

It’s better than the Voyager.  The touch-screen is a neat concept but doesn’t make the phone that much more pleasing.  The enV2 works just as well if you’re not a major touch-screen fan.  If you are a touch-screen fan then this phone does quite well.  The touch interface does better than the BlackBerry Storm, in my humbled opinion.

The speakers are Bose but the addition of the 3.5mm headphone jack is a nice gift from LG.  A music player is only as good as the headphones that give the sound.  It’s recommended to stay away from the V Cast store and just use the memory card to store your own music, or better yet, get a subscription to Windows Media Player or Rhapsody.

The Internet browser works well for simple online tasks but online video wasn’t spectacular.  Leave the internet browsing for a more powerful phone or a netbook.

The features are great for the price as is the call quality.  It’s cool looking, that’s for sure, and it takes decent picture.  We at ‘World Gone Mobile’ give it a score of an 8.1 or so.

Specs:

Carrier: Verizon

Phone Type: Flip

Camera: 3.2 Megapixel Autofocus Camera & Camcorder with Flash

Music Player: Music Player for MP3, WMA, AAC, & AAC+

Qwerty: QWERTY Keyboard with Large, Widely-Spaced Keys for Easy Messaging

Screen: Large 3” Touch Screen

Speaker Phone: One-Touch Speakerphone

Bluetooth: Version: 2.1 + EDR (Enhanced Data Rate)

Web: HTML Web Browsing†—open up to 3 windows for multi-page browsing

HAC: Hearing Aid Compatible (M4/T4-Rating)

Technology:   CDMA

Frequency: 1.9 GHz CDMA PCS, 800 MHz CDMA (Digital Dual-Band)

DataTransmission: High-Speed EVDO†

Dimensions: 4.52″(H) x 2.16″(W) x 0.66″(D)

Weight: 4.92 oz.

Display: Internal LCD: 1,600K Color TFT, 800 x 480 Pixels, 3.00″ External LCD: 1,600K Color TFT, 800 x 480 Pixels, 3.00″

Battery: 950 mAh

UsageTime: Up to 260 Minutes*

StandbyTime: Up to 408 Hours*

Features:

Large External Touch Screen wih Vibration

QWERTY Keyboard

Doument Viewer – View documents saved on a memory card

Bluetooth® Stereo Support*

3.2 Megapixel Camera

Optional Removable Memory Card

Visual Voice Mail

HTML Web Browser

V CAST Music with Rhapsody® (Subscription, Wireless and PC Downloads)

V CAST Videos

TTY Compatible

Hearing Aid Compatibility = M4/T4

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