Lg Dare Review

The LG Dare relies on its full touch screen capability for operation. With the lack of physical keypads on the phone, the phone should be equipped with adequate touch response.

To our disappointment, the phone has some problems with its design and touch screen. The main problem is in scrolling. When you touch the screen to scroll, it considers it as a tap and selects the option. This makes the whole experience of using the phone extremely dampening.

This is quite unfortunate as the Dare had a number of great features, which includes a cool interface and nice resolution. The menus are well designed and can be customized. The shortcuts can be easily changed to suit your preferences and the icons on the menu screen can be repositioned to your liking. All this was supposed to result in a great phone, but the responsiveness leaves a lot to be desired.

On testing, call quality was quite good. There was some static, but overall, the voices were very clear and you could hear the caller very well. The reception was quite exceptional. However, with the exception of those mentioned and the speaker-independent voice recognition, the other calling features didn't match expectation.

There were some additional buttons on the dialing screen. When you are on a call, there are the contacts, messaging and even note-taking buttons. However, call conference and call waiting selection isn't available! The speakerphone wasn't also of the best quality!

The onscreen keyboard on the Dare wasn't exactly the best as well. A funny part about the phone is that, the landscape keyboard never came when it was turned to the right, but came when it was turned to the left. However, the music player changed accordingly. There were so many responsiveness issues that, though messaging wasn't impossible, it was quite pain-staking.

The thing about messaging on the iPhone is the auto-correct feature, which makes messaging a cinch. However, this feature isn't available on LG Dare, which is quite a pain. Deleting characters is also really time-consuming.

Yahoo, AOL and MSN instant messaging function is available alongside with email.

The presence of a 3.5mm headset jack is a real blessing as you can use your favorite headphones. Unfortunately, the scrolling issue surfaces again and makes browsing through a long list of music difficult. The album art didn't come to the phone when synced with WMP. The MP3 player isn't a delight as well. Video playback was really good because of the great screen.

Though the GPS navigation found us wherever we went, it wasn't very good at correcting us if we veered off course. The camera is quite good, comparable to an Nseries phone like the N78. However, there were a couple of issues with the pictures. Auto-focus and face recognition are also there.

Surfing wise, the web browser was surprisingly fast and image-rich web pages sprang open quickly.

Overall, with its attractive design and functions, the LG Dare is a phone still worth your consideration.