LG enV2 Cell Phone

Here's a great little phone for those who need a full QWERTY keyboard. At less than $50 on "new every two" it sure beats Windows Mobile phones or Blackberrys. I mainly purchased this phone for accessing office e-mail when traveling. I've tried other solutions on small clam-shell phones, but never could get myself to learn to "text" very fast with the regular numeric keypad. I don't use Vcast junk or need to play MP3s from my phone, so I won't be reviewing any of that. I'll primarily give you my experience of using this phone for business use.

The Keyboard

Obviously, the keyboard is the key selling point of the enV2 phone, as with its predecessors. For someone who types quickly on a real computer keyboard, this is about as close as you'll get in a phone. I tried the various width Blackberry's and the keys are still too close together for my taste, even with the wider models. And having helped several customers with Windows Mobile phones, I just could never warm up to the clunky OS. The ones with flip down or slide out keyboards just didn't seem that easy to type on. But the enV2 seems to have gotten it right. They keys are raised enough and have enough of a click so that you can really feel your way around the keyboard. And unlike some others, you have real row of keys for the numbers. So finally, I can really type a reasonable response to a business e-mail on this phone. No need for non-professional abbreviations and lingo.

I found the keyboard usable enough to also try out mobile instant messaging. We use IM at work to communicate between different offices, so now I can stay in touch with these folks when not in the office too.

E-Mail access

Because the keyboard is the key feature of this phone, I'll spend some time commenting on the various e-mail options available.

There are multiple applications and ways to get to e-mail accounts with this phone. As with other phones with Mobile Web 2.0, you can get to web-based services like Hotmail and Yahoo accounts via "Mobile Web Email". This is not much help for office e-mail. And it's clunky to wait for the browser to launch and connect to those sites. I also wanted something that would push e-mail to the phone or at least send notification when new mail arrives.

One step in the right direction was Verizon's new "Mobile Email" application. This will allow you to configure POP or IMAP accounts in addition to Hotmail and others. I tried this with my personal account on Hotmail and loved the notifications when new mail arrived. The interface of Mobile Email is neat and clean. I give it high ratings. But we use Microsoft Exchange for our corporate E-mail. I could still use Mobile Email, but would have to just access my office mail via POP access. It's not a terrible solution, but it wouldn't access the corporate directory or put the sent messages in Outlook's sent mail folder.

For true Exchange capabilities (including calendar, contacts, and e-mail) I had to go with RemoSync, a Get It Now application with full synchronization and push capabilities directly to an Exchange server. It works fairly well. Notification of new mail is instant. And the first part of each message is automatically pushed to the phone along with the headers, so they are ready to read as soon as you open the phone. Replies end up in your Exchange "sent mail" folder. Contacts will actually sync to the phone's internal contacts list, which could be good or bad, based on what you store there. Generally it's probably a good idea. Just be careful if you have 100's of contacts in Outlook if you don't want them to clutter up your phone's contact list. You'll need to configure it not to sync contacts. There are several shortcomings of RemoSync that I've provided as feedback to the company, such as only two short lines for an e-mail signature, which is not enough for a professional corporate signature file. But overall, it's a decent app. The cost is $10 per month. A whole review could be written just on RemoSync, but that's getting too side tracked from the phone review, so I'll move on. Ultimately, a built-in e-mail app with full sync would really be the best bet.

Lastly in regards to e-mail, I think I saw that Verizon's Wireless Sync would work with this phone. It's $20 per month. That seems high to me for e-mail, so I've not tried it.

External Display and Menu
The external display is not a full display as with earlier versions of the phone. The display is shorter vertically. As a result, you don't get full menu functionality with the external display alone and need to open the phone for some options. But the most common ones are available. Gone is the traditional 4-way selector. Instead, there are just up and down arrows with an OK button between. So the menus are always vertical. Press OK twice to unlock keyguard (not configurable, but I have not issues with it).

Menu: Press OK for a menu of 6 choices, Contacts, Messaging, Recent Calls, My Music, Bluetooth, and Keyguard timeout. Actually, this seems to be the only place for setting the keyguard timeout, which defaults to 7 seconds and was driving me crazy! The contacts list can only display two at a time as you scroll, due to the short screen.

Contacts: The up arrow is a shortcut to jump directly to your contacts list. Again, only 2 at a time show on this screen.

Messaging: The down arrow jumps to messaging. You can start a message here, but only to one recipient. I'd never use the phone while closed for messaging anyhow with that nice keyboard inside.

Internal Display

Big and bright. That describes the internal display. E-mail, instant messaging, text messages…all a pleasure on this screen. It's almost big enough to justify a "real" browser, but not quite. If you've never used Mobile Web 2.0, it's okay for sites designed for mobile, but useless for virtually all regular web sites.

Sound

The sound quality is decent for calls. It's not as loud as it could be though. I occasionally find myself turning up the volume only to discover that it's already all the way up. The phone automatically switches to speakerphone mode if you open it while on a call. Nice. If it's already open, there's a small speakerphone toggle button on the keyboard. The speakerphone is actually not too bad. No speakerphone works well when there's lots of background noise like in a car though. It's great for listening back to voicemail though to free up hands for note taking or whatever.

I guess that the "dual stereo speakers" are supposed to be appealing to someone who uses this phone for music. But you obviously can't get any bass out of any speaker that small, so I'm not really sure what the point is in taking up the extra space for two speakers. It's not like you'll sit back and and jam out and say "wow, what great stereo separation…sounds like the guiter player is over on one side of the room and the drummer on the other!" They are a gimmick. MP3 fans will be using headphones. Maybe they help give more volume to the speakerphone though.

Menu System

The menu system for the enV2 is similar to other Verizon phones. No new major interfaces to be found here. There are four themes to choose from, and they are all sort of slick. Navigation with the 4-way controller and OK button to the right of the keyboard is fairly simple. The odd thing to get used to though is that your OK button is not centered between the two soft menus like on a standard clam-shell phone. So you reach up and hit the right soft menu for something, then need to choose the middle option with OK, but it's actually down and even further to the right than the right soft key is. But you get used to it after awhile.

One small thing I don't like is that they put VZ Navigator right on the main menu. That's great if you use it, but I never will, as I use a small Garmin Nuvi and would not pay VZN fees, so it just wastes space and gives more to scroll through.

Shortcuts

There are lots of ways to assign one or two key shortcuts to get to your favorite places/menus on the phone.

Qwerty Shortcut: This allows you to set a the phone to automatically start a text message or the notpad app to start by simply opening the phone and pressing a key on the keyboard. This would be cool for those who text message a lot. Unfortunately for me, it can't be set to launch a GIN app such as RemoSync which I use for e-mail.

Directional Keys: You can set a menu or app to launch when pressing the up, left, or down directional keys. Here you can actually choose a GIN application including IM, RemoSync, etc. Nice.

My Shortcuts: When you press the right directional key, you get a pop up menu with four items of your choosing for common menu items or apps (same choices as directional keys).

Fn Menu: The keyboard has a small "Fn" button as the top left key. Pressing this key brings up a two column menu with 10 choices. Each of the 10 can be reassigned to a menu choice or app that you choose. The list is the same as above.

Bluetooth

Bluetooth works great on this phone. In addition to BT headset, it also supports other profiles that will let you push name card/contact info to other devices and even transfer photos from the phone to a BT enabled laptop. My favorite BT capability though is DUN, or DialUp Networking. This allows you to use the phone as a modem for your laptop but without the need for a tether cable. With VZW's EVDO network, speeds are quite impressive. I was easily able to use Remote Desktop to control my office PC in addition to regular email and web browsing. It's not as responsive as my DSL connection at home. But I did have a change to compare it to satellite Internet (Hughes) at a relative's house and my phone connection was MUCH faster than the satellite one. Satellite has some high burst speeds, but huge amounts of latency that made remote desktop a lesson in frustration. If you want to use the phone for this type of Internet access, you need a data plan ($59/mo for up to 5GB I think). The good news though is that you can enable and disable that on your plan as needed. So I only turn it on for the month if I'll be traveling.

I was successful in quickly pairing the phone with each of two different Bluetooth headsets. One was a Samsung and the other a Motorola (both were sub-$20 devices on sale!).

Battery Life, Size, Weight

I'm using the standard, included battery. I'm not impressed. Even with light usage, I'm hard pressed to get two full days out of it. I've gotten to where I just charge it every night. This is a big disappointment after reading reviews elsewhere that brag about weekend warriors leaving the charger at home. No way…even with Bluetooth turned off. I hate the extra weight and bulk of extended batteries, as I'm one who keeps the phone in a pocket, not on my hip.

Speaking of bulk and weight, I think LG found sweet spot with this model. Previous models seemed just a tad too big for me, so I stayed away. I compared this to my standard clam-shell phone (Samsung SCH-A930) and found it only slightly longer and wider, yet actually a little less thick. It fits nicely in pants pockets. With a front screen though, I just need to be careful not to put it in the same pocket with my keys and scratch up the display.

Camera

The 2.0 megapixel camera is okay for a quick shot. Quality is about what you'd expect from a tiny lens in a small phone. Occasionally I grab a decent shot. It's nice to be able to transfer the photos to the laptop via Bluetooth. There is a microSD slot though, so if you're saving to a card, you can remove it and put it in an SD adapter then into a computer card reader.

You can use the internal or external display for taking shots. If using just the external, with the phone closed, you can't see the whole frame due to the skinny screen. You'll actually not be able to see a lot of the top and bottom of the frame. But when using the internal display, it's quite awkward holding the phone open and keeping your finger out of the way of the lens. Oh well, what do you want for a camera in a phone?

Options allow you to set the resolution (4 settings), use a self timer, set white balance, choose a shutter sound, choose color effects (like sepia), set night mode, set focal point (spot or average), and choose to save to internal or card memory. Note that while some camera phones have a small LED flash, this one does not.

Voice Commands

I was spoiled by my Samsung phone. I'm convinced that Samsung has the best voice recognition anywhere. This LG phone is better than ones I've used previously like the VX6100 (which was never really usable), but still has a way to go to catch up to Samsung. Of all the odd things, it has difficulty with recognizing YES and NO responses. Sometimes it will do a good job guessing which contact name I say, but will ask for confirmation, "Did you say…" and then take three tries to recognize "yes" or "no" which should be a far easier task to only have to distinguish between two possible choices. I'm a bit perturbed at this. I finally figured if I really draw out the ssss at the end of "yes" it will help. I'm almost convinced that it's more of a bug than anything. When it works though, it is kinda cool to just say "Call Jim Moble" and have it place the call. This is especially nice when using a headset. It does do fairly well at recognizing digit-dialing. For this you simply say "call 770-555-1212". It will repeat the number back and ask for a yes/no confirmation from you.