LG Dare Review - Design & Features

Design & Features

 

Editor Rating: 4.7

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Styling:  5 

Ease of Use:  5 

Display:  4 

Voice Quality:  4 

Battery Life:  5 

Quality/Durability:  5 

The back panel of Dare is finished in black soft-touch plastic that’s easy to hold on to, and the handset fit easily and securely into my hand.  Dare’s relatively small size means that its display is noticeably smaller than those of Instinct and iPhone, but it’s also very pocketable.  The phone weighs in at around three and three-quarter ounces, which makes it feel “light” and “solid” at the same time. 

Dare’s display looks good, and I found it a bit more responsive to the touch than Instinct or Vu and much easier to use than Glyde, though it’s not in iPhone’s class when it comes to flicking through menus and double-clicking Web links in the HTML browser.  There’s also a handwriting recognition mode and drawing apps that let you create pictures or draw on top of photos and then send the images off to friends in Email or via MMS.  With a 240 x 400 resolution capable of 262K colors, the LG’s widescreen rendered images, video clips, and animations richly and vividly.  When it came to texting and Emailing, I found it easier to use Dare in virtual T9 mode than full QWERTY mode - the horizontal QWERTY board is fairly well done, but the phone’s screen was small enough to make for somewhat cramped thumb typing.  A built-in accelerometer automatically switched input modes when I rotated the phone in my hand, which is a neat touch.

Verizon and LG packed Dare full of multimedia features and built a standard (3.5mm) headphone jack into the phone’s top panel so you can enjoy all of that audiovisual goodness in full stereo over your own headphones (Dare also supports A2DP for Stereo Bluetooth).  The VCAST player works well and includes a semi-lame knockoff of iPhone’s Cover Flow mode - Dare’s version lets you click between album art like iPhone, when you do the phone simply skips forward or back one track at a time.  Dare is also VZW’s first device to support the new Rhapsody option, which gives you unlimited access to some 5 million or so audio tracks on your handset and PC for $15/month.  The player also supports Verizon’s own VCAST music store ($1.99 per track downloads) and streaming audio and video clips, and Rev. A EV-DO made for speedy downloads of purchased audio tracks - just over a minute for a 1.6MB track.  Audio/video clips and images can be stored in the phone’s generous 200MB of internal memory, or on microSD memory cards, and transferred to and from a PC via Bluetooth, message, card or USB data cable.

Dare also sports the best camera currently offered by a cellular carrier in the US; Nokia’s N82 and Sony Ericsson’s K850i are better, but you can’t walk into a VZW, AT&T, Sprint, or T-Mobile store and pick up anything better than Dare.  Dare’s 3.2MP autofocus camera with Schneider-Kreuznach lens delivered sharp images with crisp details and rich color, and a variety of options including face detection and multiple editing options add to the package.  While the LED flash only works at close range and did tend to add color noise to photos, it’s a sometimes handy addition nonetheless.  Dare also features full VGA resolution video capture at up to 30 fps, and a 120 fps capture mode that’s cool for super slow-motion effects like capturing sports footage.  One note about the camera:  The shutter button takes a bit of getting used to, as it controls auto-focus and switches between still and video modes depending on how hard you press it and how long you keep it pressed down for.