Voyager: LG's Second-Place Smartphone

The Korean manufacturer's new touch-screen phone is missing some of the iPhone's best features, but it looks good, and costs less, too

by Catherine Holahan

Editor's Rating:

The Good: Sleek design, touch screen and full typewriter keyboard, vibrant display

The Bad: Scrolling via touch screen is a pain, Web pages load slowly

The Bottom Line: A beautiful contender for best-designed mobile device, but still not quite the iPhone

Reader Reviews

My problem with touch screens is they're not like buttons. They are, of course, much better looking than buttons, especially on cramped devices such as cell phones, but when I'm typing, be it on a computer keyboard or a handheld, I like the sensation of pressing something solid. Without that tactile feedback, I just don't feel my device and I are communicating.

LG Electronics seems to understand. The designers behind LG's Voyager VX10000 clearly took pains to make this touch-screen phone not only beautiful, but delightfully user-friendly. At $300 with a two-year Verizon (VZ) contract, the Voyager is fairly pricey compared with most cell phones. But it's also more wallet-friendly than many BlackBerrys, Treos, and iPhones—devices with higher-end features the Voyager also offers.

When you press Voyager's external touch screen, which measures nearly 3 in. diagonally, it vibrates slightly beneath your finger. This reaction from LG's VibeTouch technology lets you know the device has registered your tap in the same way you've been conditioned to expect from any keyboard or keypad—by feel. It's a little thing. But for high-end phones, it's the little things that matter.

It's Simpler to Use the Keys

Voyager has plenty of features that make it easy for push-button people to join the minimalist, mobile future. In particular, this device opens like a clam to reveal a pearl of a keyboard. This full QWERTY board's keys are big and not jammed together. There's also a mini-mouse for scrolling and clicking on the large inner screen's commands and links.

The keyboard is particularly important in this device because the touch screen has some frustrating failings. For starters, it doesn't share the multi-touch capability of Apple's (AAPL) iPhone, which lets you swipe a finger across the screen to see the other side of a Web page or the lower half of an online article you're reading. Instead, scrolling down or across a page on the Voyager requires tapping on tiny bars beside and below, and it doesn't work so well. Figuring out just where to touch this bar was annoying. Often the screen would advance farther than I wanted. It was much easier, and faster, to simply open the phone and use the inner keypad controls to navigate the nontouch screen.

You'll also want to use the keyboard and inner screen for Web browsing. Sure, the touch screen makes it easy to connect to the Web just by pressing a couple of icons, and when you press an address bar, search box, or log-in field, a virtual keyboard appears to punch in the letters; but it can require multiple taps to get to that keyboard, which is difficult to use. It's easier to open the phone and type on real keys.

Not What You're Used To

Similarly, the browser's default setting displays only a portion of a Web page on the screen—another reason not to waste time with the external display. To view the rest of a page, you need to struggle with those tiny scroll bars. This made me wish it could minimize the entire page the way the iPhone can so I could get a quick sense of where I was scrolling.

The Voyager operates on Verizon's speedy data network, which can download information about as fast as a basic DSL or cable broadband connection. I found the text on Web pages loaded relatively fast, but it took some waiting before the all the graphics would appear. To boost the speed, the browser can be set to display text only, but this doesn't make for a familiar Web-surfing experience.

The phone features a 2-megapixel camera, and a music player that supports songs recorded in MP3, Windows Media, and AAC formats. Verizon's V Cast service for finding new tunes and artists is easy to navigate and pretty robust, though songs cost $2 if you purchase and download them over the wireless network. The phone also works with V Cast's mobile TV service—which features eight TV channels including CBS (CBS), Comedy Central (VIA), and ESPN (DIS)—but I had trouble getting the broadcast signal in the locations where I tried it.

Silver Medal for Design

The Voyager also has a GPS satellite receiver to provide your coordinates for Verizon's VZ Navigator service (BusinessWeek.com, 9/5/07), which provides driving directions and other location-based information.

All in all, the Voyager is a beautiful phone packed with innovative features and services. The touch screen in particular shows off some interesting technology. Had it arrived before the middle of last year, the Voyager might have easily won my vote for best-designed cell phone. But the iPhone got here first, and now it's the gold standard for handhelds. The Voyager gets a silver medal.

Holahan is a writer for BusinessWeek.com in New York .