LG Dare Review - Usability & Performance

Usability & Performance

 

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 

Audio quality on headphones (not included) while playing back audio and video clips was quite good, and while I wouldn’t rely on the internal speaker for listening to music it actually got fairly loud for a phone.  Mono and Stereo Bluetooth audio also worked well, and pairing was fairly easy. 

Dare’s user interface is really pretty nice, especially for a Verizon phone.  While I still think there may be one shortcut menu too many on Dare, I really like the ability to drag and drop shortcut icons from the main menu to the home screen.  Unlike the Sprint Samsung Instinct, which has a Home screen made up of only shortcuts, Dare lets you arrange shortcuts on top of a wallpaper image or animated background.  This allows for a combination of customizability and functionality not found on many other consumer-level handsets (aside from a jailbroken iPhone, I can’t think of any, actually).

Verizon is hyping Dare’s handwriting recognition and Drawing Pad features, but I wasn’t really blown away by either of them.  Drawing Pad is kind of neat, but I can’t imagine too many people opting for handwriting instead of virtual QWERTY or T9 when composing messages on the device.  I did like the ability to add contacts to my Favorites list by dragging their photos around the screen - Dare’s full of little features like that that make using it fun. 

Dare also supports mobile Email for popular services like Yahoo and AOL, as well as Mobile IM.  VZW subscribers with the appropriate data plans can also tether their laptops to Dare and use the phone as a data modem.  An integrated GPS chip provides location based services and works with Verizon’s VZ Navigator service; while not quite as good as the nav solution on Instinct, VZ Navigator still worked quite well on Dare.

There’s also a full HTML Web browser on Dare.  On the one hand this lets you get out of the “Mobile Web” of WAP-only sites and out into the world of HTML Web sites (but not Web 2.0 or Flash-enhanced sites).  On the other hand, the browser isn’t at the level of Opera, Safari (iPhone), or Symbian S60 (Nokia N- and E-Series) browsers, so using it proved frustrating from time to time.  Zooming and panning weren’t particularly smooth, which was a problem given the realities of viewing made-for-desktop Web sites on a 3” display - reading text and clicking links was basically impossible without zooming in and panning around a page.