One of the most notable fallouts of the Apple iPhone launch last year is the ever-growing trend of touch-screen phones. LG was one of the first manufacturers out of the gate with phones such as the LG Voyager and the LG Vu dazzling us with features that we couldn't get on the iPhone, like live mobile TV and 3G connectivity. Samsung then came blazing out with the Instinct, a phone that directly targets the iPhone with visual voice mail, integrated GPS, and corporate e-mail support. Yet, many of these phones still walked on familiar ground with its design and features.
LG's latest handset, however, dares to take things in a different direction. The appropriately named LG Dare presents a few tricks we haven't seen before in the touch-screen phone genre. For example, you can drag and drop icons to make your own customized shortcuts on the home screen, or you can use a drawing pad to sketch 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 on a touch-screen phone--its 3.2-megapixel camera has settings like face detection, noise reduction, panorama photo stitching, and a SmartPic technology designed for taking photos in low light. The built-in camcorder can even record high-speed video and play it back in slow-motion, which is a first for U.S. camera phones. We certainly wouldn't want to call this an iPhone killer since it doesn't have features such as Wi-Fi, and its Web browser and media player aren't as good. However, the Dare is a very appealing alternative for Verizon customers who want a touch-screen phone with a difference. The LG Dare is priced competitively at $199 after a $50 mail-in rebate and a two-year service agreement.
Design
Like all touch-screen phones, the LG Dare's design is dominated by a large display covering almost the entirety of the phone's front surface. Indeed, the only visible keys on the front are the Call, Clear/Voice command, and End/Power keys at the very bottom. The Dare is quite a bit smaller than both the iPhone and the Samsung Instinct, measuring only 4.1 inches long by 2.2 inches wide by 0.5 inch thick. It has a stainless steel border along its sides, and a black soft touch surface on the back that gives it a nice grip in the hand. It weighs about 3.76 ounces, which gives it a light yet solid feel.
The smaller size of the Dare also results in a smaller space for the 3-inch-wide display (compared with the 4-plus-inch displays on the other two phones). Though we were fine with it for most applications, we'll admit that it deters us from enjoying the full HTML browser (which we'll get to in the Features section), since it means we have to do more scrolling than usual. The display supports 262,000 colors and a 240x400-pixel resolution, which results in a stunning and colorful screen with vibrant graphics and clean text. You can adjust the backlight time, the menu fonts, the dial fonts, the display theme, and even the image of the charging screen. You can also choose animated wallpaper if you like.
Along the bottom row of the display's home screen are five shortcut icons to the messaging in-box, the phone interface, the main menu, the phonebook, and a favorites menu (which is a customizable graphical layout of up to nine favorite contacts). There's also a small arrow icon on the far right of the display (about a 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 these shortcut icons to change the order in which they appear. However, the coolest thing is that you can also drag and drop them directly to the home screen. Simply tap on an icon and drag it toward the home screen, and let go. You can then arrange the icons anywhere on your home screen as well.
Going back to the Favorites menu, not only do you have a graphical layout of your favorite contacts, but you can also drag and drop them around the screen. After selecting a contact, you can either have instant access to a new text message or an immediate phone call. You can also edit that contact information on the spot.
Another innovative aspect of the Dare's touch screen is the option for a "scattered" menu interface layout. You can then drag and drop the scattered icons to new positions in the menu. We found this to be quite fun and intuitive, but can't help but think it's rather unnecessary. We would have been just as happy with the traditional grid menu layout (which is a menu style option as well). Throughout the menu interface, you will see a back arrow on the upper left, which will lead you back to the previous screen, and a Home button, which will lead you back to the home screen.
Like the Instinct, the Dare offers haptic tactile feedback, which gives tiny vibrations when tapping on the screen. It's very helpful when selecting menu options, since it provides a physical confirmation of the selection. You can go through a calibration wizard to adjust to the screen's sensitivity, and you can adjust the vibrate type (short, double, or long) and vibrate level (low, medium, high, or off altogether). You can also turn on "vibration when scrolling," which sets off tiny vibrations when scrolling up and down lists. We actually recommend this, so you know you're scrolling through a list and not accidentally selecting something.
Features
The Dare comes with a generous 1,000-entry contacts list with room in each entry for five numbers and two e-mail addresses. You can also save callers to groups, and you can pair them with a photo and one of 26 polyphonic ringtones. Other essential features include text and multimedia messaging, a vibrate mode, a speakerphone, a calculator, a tip calculator, a calendar, an alarm clock, a stopwatch, a world clock, and a notepad. More advanced features include full Bluetooth support with stereo A2DP, the capability to use the phone as a modem, and file transfer. There's also mobile e-mail, mobile instant messaging, a USB mass storage mode, voice command and voice dialing, voice recording, and GPS functionality via Verizon's VZ Navigator service. Mobile e-mail is restricted to popular Web mail services such as Hotmail, Yahoo, and AOL, so it's not nearly as robust as using a smartphone.
A nice bonus feature on the Dare is a drawing pad. This pad lets you sketch little doodles or draw a rough map with a variety of pen sizes and colors. You can then send this image to your friends via MMS if you wish.
The Dare has a full HTML browser. It won't support Flash, but that's fine for a phone such as this. As we mentioned earlier, you can rotate the phone to display the browser in landscape mode, which makes entering URLs a lot easier via the QWERTY keyboard. However, the browser experience is nowhere as clean as the Safari browser on the iPhone. Zooming in and out is a pain--we had to use either the onscreen controls or the volume keys to do so. Panning the browser page with our fingers took some time, as the screen responded slowly. Also, since the display is small, we often had to do a lot of scrolling to see everything. Alternatively, if we zoomed out to see the browser page in full-screen mode, the text would be too small to read (The camera key can be used to see the full screen overview as well). You can bookmark pages as well as send URLs to your friends via e-mail, which is a nice touch. However, the overall experience left us cold, and we almost would rather opt for the stripped-down mobile versions of the Web sites instead.
Of course, since the Dare is on the Verizon EV-DO network, it also has access to Verizon's broadband services in the form of V Cast Video and V CastMusic. The V Cast Video and V Cast Music experience is the same as that on other phones. However, the music player interface is quite improved over what we've seen before. There are shortcut icons to Play All, Shop, and Sync, which correspond to the full playlist, the V Cast Music store, and USB syncing respectively. Songs are automatically categorized by genre, artist, and album, and settings include repeat and shuffle. When playing a song, you get the typical play, pause, and track shuttle controls, plus you get to see album art as well. There's even a pseudo Cover Flow that lets you flick through songs by moving your finger across the screen. The Dare also has something called Background Mode Music that lets you listen to music in the background while doing other things--the music pauses when you receive 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.