I finally got my new phone today. I have succumb to the touch screen trend and bought a brand spanking new LG Dare. After using the phone for a few hours I thought I would write up a basic review for those Verizon customers looking to enter the touch screen era.
My first impressions of the Dare are stronger than I actually expected. This phone is small, sleek and built to shine. Smaller than the iPhone and styled similar to the Prada phone, the Dare is a sleek little machine. The black and chrome facing give it a professional look. The screen is bright, clear and colorful. The features are impressive and the quality is top notch. There are a few minor flaws with the Dare though and I’d like to cover both sides with some pro and cons.
Pros:
- Slick design
- Host of features including 3.2MP camera, 120fps video camera, tactile vibration feedback, VZ Navigator, email, full HTML browser, SMS/MMS, music/video player, VCast video, and much more.
- Excellent reception and call quality
- Great sound quality (both ringtones and music)
- Loud ringer
- Light and proximity sensors
- Handwriting recognition is excellent
- expandable MicroSD slot (up to 8GB)
- flush 3.5mm headphone jack
- Stereo bluetooth support
- Fun drawing pad program
- GPS
- Great battery life
Cons:
- Kind of hard to read outdoors in bright light
- Fingerprint magnet
- HTML browser is nice but could be better
- BREW still sucks
Overall the Dare is a pretty amazing phone. What it lacks in “iPhone-esque” features is more than makes up for with it’s own extras. Witht he era of the touch phone upon us the LG Dare is a strong competitor and a winner for Verizon. For only $199 it’s going to move fast too.
July 3rd, 2008 at 4:37 pm
I found a few other features I absolutely love on the Dare.
1) The music player sounds amazing! It has better bass and mid-range support than my iPod did.
2) You can do just about anything while listening to music (web, email, text, tools, etc…) The only things I found that pause the music is taking a call (obviously) and playing games (because they use their own sounds)
3) I forgot to mention MobileIM support in my original review. One thing the iPhone is greatly lacking is support for MSN Messenger and Yahoo. The Dare can access both of those and AIM.
4) Rhapsody music is supported. Since Rhapsody now has $0.99 DRM-free MP3s this is an amazing feature!
July 19th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
Interesting observation on the music player’s sound. My first impression of my Dare was actually that the music sounded quite tinny in comparison to my iPod Touch. I played around with the equalizer settings a bit, and the only setting that seemed to minimize the tinny sound was the Pop setting (even though the music I have playing is instrumental and about as far from pop as can be).
Also, out of curiosity, have you been having difficulty with album art and/or album info when transferring them to your Dare?
July 19th, 2008 at 9:55 pm
Yes, I have read that the album art has to be perfectly 200×200 in resolution so that’s likely the reason my covers haven’t been showing up. Most cover services (iTunes included) use much larger images that the Dare doesn’t seem to recognize.