LG Venus review: LG Venus

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LG Venus

LG has really impressed us this year with a number of innovative handsets that offer rich feature sets and beautiful designs--the LG VX8550 Chocolate and the LG Voyager VX10000 are just two that have especially garnered our affections. Now LG has come out with the LG Venus, a stunningly beautiful phone with a unique dual-screen design that features onscreen touch-sensitive controls. Its features aren't too shabby either, with a 2-megapixel camera, a music player, 3G support, V Cast support, and more. It's also not terribly expensive at $199.99 after a $50 discount and a two-year contract with Verizon Wireless. To find accessories for this phone, see our cell phone ringtones and accessories guide.

Design
At first glance, the LG Venus looks a little like the LG Prada with what appears to be a full 3-inch display. A closer look, however, reveals that there are actually two screens--the one on top is a regular QVGA display, while the one underneath is a touch screen that shows onscreen navigation controls. Measuring 4 inches by 2 inches by 0.62 inch, the Venus has quite a sleek, slender figure with curved corners and faux-leather covering on the back. This gives it a nice and luxurious feel in the hand and a comfortable grip.

As we mentioned above, there are two displays on the front; the upper screen is the primary display, while the lower acts as a touch navigation array. The upper screen measures 2 inches diagonally and is simply beautiful to behold. It supports a luscious 262,000 colors, and graphics and animation look fantastic. We are also fans of the Venus' menu interface theme with its simple and minimalist design--quite the improvement over the classic Verizon theme. You can adjust the display's backlight, the font size, and the clock format, but not the brightness or contrast.

The really special thing about the Venus, however, is its unique navigation interface. Measuring about 1.5 inches diagonally, the lower screen displays touch-sensitive navigation controls with different layouts depending on the application. For example, on the default standby page, the touch-screen layout has the Menu button in the middle with shortcuts to messaging, contacts, a shortcuts folder, and recent calls arranged around it. The shortcuts folder contains up to four user-defined shortcuts to different applications. On the menu interface page however, the onscreen layout changes to an OK button in the middle and up and down arrows positioned above and below it. Similarly, when the music player is activated, you will see music player controls on the display, and when the camera is activated, you will see camera controls instead.

The Venus has onscreen navigation controls on a touch-screen display.

We were very skeptical with the usability of the onscreen controls. For one thing, we had to constantly hit the unlock button when the phone went to sleep. Also, the lack of tactile buttons does mean that you have to pay more attention so you can avoid accidental presses. We were also disappointed that you couldn't alter the touch-sensitivity of the controls. That said, the controls require a light yet firm touch, so accidental presses didn't happen that often. Also, the touch-screen interface does feature haptic controls, and you can adjust the vibration levels depending on how much feedback you want. So on the whole, we think the touch-screen navigation works really well, though it's still a little too gimmicky.

Slide open the phone and you'll find a very spacious and tactile number keypad with the Send, Clear, and End/Power keys on the top row. The slider mechanism felt quite sturdy when opening and closing the phone as well. All keys are very well-spaced apart with a lovely raised curved texture that makes it quite easy to dial by feel. The keypad also has alternating colors, which we think is a nice touch. The volume rocker, voice recorder button, and headset and charger jacks sit on the left spine, while the right is home to a microSD card slot, a dedicated Music player key, and a dedicated camera key. On the back is the camera lens.

Features
The LG Venus is more than just a pretty face; in fact, it has a very impressive feature set that complements its design nicely. But before we get to that, we'll start with the basics. The Venus has a 1,000-entry contacts list with room in each entry for five phone numbers and two e-mail addresses. You can organize them by caller groups, and pair them with a photo or any of 16 ringtones and five alert tones for caller ID. Other essentials include a vibrate mode, a speakerphone, text and multimedia messaging, a calendar, an alarm clock, a world clock, a stopwatch, a notepad, a tip calculator, and a voice memo recorder, plus voice command support. On the higher end, there's also e-mail, PC syncing, USB mass storage, instant messaging, a wireless Web browser, and stereo Bluetooth. A nice departure from Verizon, the Bluetooth supports file transfer, object push, and dial-up networking protocols. In addition, the Venus has built-in GPS so you can use it with Verizon's own location-based service called VZ Navigator for turn-by-turn directions.

The Venus displays onscreen music player controls when the music player is activated.

The Venus comes with 3G support in the form of built-in EV-DO. This gives the VX8800 access to the full stable of Verizon's broadband services like streaming video from V Cast Videos and the ability to download songs over the air from V Cast Music. The music player interface is nice and clean thanks to the onscreen music player controls, and you can view the album art when a song is playing. The songs are automatically organized by artist, genre, and album, and you can create and manage your own playlists if you wish. Other music player options include a shuffle and repeat mode, 11 different preset equalizer settings (or "sound effects"), plus a Music Only mode (also known as Airplane mode) which turns the cell phone RF off so you can use the phone to play music while in flight (It does not turn off Bluetooth, though, so you can still use your Bluetooth headset to listen to music). Another nice touch is that you can multitask while the music is playing--you can hide the player and continue browsing the Web or typing out text messages. The music player supports MP3, WMA, AAC, and AAC+ file formats, and 64MB of internal memory is dedicated to music storage. If you wish to add more storage, the Venus also has a microSD card slot that supports cards up to 8GB.

The Venus has a 2-megapixel camera on the back, but no self-portrait mirror or flash.

The Venus has a lovely 2-megapixel camera that can take pictures in four resolutions (1,600x1,200; 1,280x960; 640x480; 320x240), five white-balance settings, and five color effects. Other settings include spot metering, up to 2x zoom (not usable at the highest resolution), a brightness setting, a night mode, a self-timer, plus three different shutter sounds (with a silent option). As we mentioned above, the camera application has its own special onscreen navigation controls, which are positioned landscape-wise so you are prompted to take a photo with the phone held sideways, much like a regular camera. Do note that there is no self-portrait mirror on the back, so it's a little tricky to take self-portrait shots. Photo quality was quite good, with sharp edges and accurate colors, though a tiny bit overcast. There's also a built-in camcorder with two different video resolutions (320x240 and 176x144), and many of the editing options are similar to the still camera. Video recording time is limited to 30 seconds for multimedia messages and up to 1 hour for saving. Video quality was fairly mediocre, and it couldn't handle fast movements, resulting in jerky and blurry video clips.

The Venus takes pretty good photos.

Personalization options with the Venus are plentiful--it comes with a variety of color themes, wallpaper, screen savers, alert tones, and more. Of course, you have the option to purchase more via the Venus's built-in Web browser. The Venus comes with one game called VZW Board Games, but you can always download more as well.

Performance
We tested the dual-band LG Venus (CDMA 800/1900; EV-DO) in San Francisco using the Verizon Wireless service. We were very impressed with the call quality--voices sounded loud, clear, and natural, without a lot of noise in the background. Callers sometimes reported slight hisses and static, but even then call quality was good. We managed to make voice command calls with very little problems as well. Speakerphone calls went similarly well, with good strong volume and clear voices.

As far as music goes, songs sounded loud and clear with good bass, but it did sound a tiny bit hollow when played via the phone's built-in speakers. We paired the LG Venus with the Cardo S-2 Bluetooth headset successfully, and both call and audio quality were substantially better when compared to the speakers.

The EV-DO data speeds made a noticeable difference when we were streaming video and browsing the Web. V Cast videos loaded very quickly, and there was little to no rebuffering. That said, video quality was still pretty bad, with quite a bit of pixelation especially with action sequences. Loading a typical Web page took a few seconds, while downloading a song took about a minute for a 5.16MB file.

The LG Venus has a rated battery life of 4 hours talk time and 20 days in standby time. In our tests, we received only 3 hours, 16 minutes of talk time. According to FCC radiation tests, the Venus has a digital SAR rating of 1.26 watts per kilogram.