Using the LG Voyager as a Smartphone
Recently, I purchased an LG Voyager. Since my previous phone was a smart phone, I did a massive amount of reading and debating before purchasing the Voyager - I actually wanted to downgrade my phone, but not lose a lot of functionality that I was used to having. The Voyager is not a smart phone, but it has a lot of features that allow me to maintain the same features, which is what I want, and it does so for less than half the cost. After using it for a few weeks and finding that I do not miss my smart phone at all, I figured I’d share my thoughts of my experience with some of the features of the Voyager that allow me to maintain all of the same functionality as a smart phone (for much cheaper).
A note about Outlook and Google services
It’s important to note that if you’re looking to know if the Voyager will sync with Microsoft Outlook for email and calendar, then this review is not going to cover that topic. I sync everything with Google services and Google provides a lot of functionality that makes it easy to push their services to cell phones via SMS. I also want to add that the Voyager comes with a full HTML browser so it is possible to check your Outlook email via the web interface, but that’s not the focus of this post.
What I wanted out of a phone
As previously mentioned, aside from making calls and sending/receiving text messages, I want my phone to provide access to my email, my calendar, and to have the functionality that will allow me to casually browse the internet to, say, read my RSS feeds. In addition to access to these services, I’d like my phone to ping me when I’ve received a new email and whenever I’ve got a calendar event about to occur.
Additionally, as much as I love having the full QWERTY keyboard, I found that I actually missed sending quick text messages using the numeric keypad. Smart phones are wide enough such that it basically requires two hands to type any type of message and that frustrated me at times. Luckily, the Voyager has both.
Lastly, I ended up disliking Windows Mobile - I probably should have seen that coming, but either way, I digress as that isn’t the point of this post. Basically, I wanted to “de-grade” to a dumb phone from a smart phone in order to save money, but maintain smart phone functionality all the while.
HTML Browser
The first thing I want to point out is the quality of the browser on the LG Voyager. It’s a full HTML browser (versus the usual WAP browser found on most dumb phones), so, excluding things such as JavaScript, the phone renders pages almost exactly the same as you’d see on your desktop. Matched with the speed of the Verizon EV-DO network, you get a really solid browsing experience. The browser was one of the selling points of the phone for me - with this browser, the touch screen, and the EV-DO network, I have web access to almost all of the usual pages that I use. Most major sites also have mobile version available, such as YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, and Google, if the standard version doesn’t load.
Getting Email
Because I maintain everything using my Gmail account (with the exception of work email), I had been syncing my previous phone’s email client using IMAP with Gmail. This proved to be nice, but, seeing as how I’m at a computer most of the day, the benefits of IMAP weren’t as strong as I could basically just respond to the email from my machine. The phone ended up, more often than not, notifying me of whenever I had received a new email. In the rare case that I wasn’t near a computer, it was nice to be able to send an email from my phone.
Since the Voyager is not a smart phone, it has no true email client that most phones like the Treo or the Blackjack have; however, Gmail offers the ability to automatically forward emails as they are received. Since you can send a text message to any phone on the Verizon network at [phone-number]–>
Obviously, this doesn’t allow me to respond to an email, and the email is truncated because of space limitations of cell phones, but it provides notification that I do have an email so I can respond whenever I get back to a computer, or I can open up the browser on the phone to respond if I absolutely need to respond at that time.
Calendar Notifications
The second major point that I want out of my phone is the ability to have my schedule available with me, and to have the ability to add, remove, and update items on the go. With my previous phone, I was able to do this; however, I’d then have to run the synchronization application in order to have both calendars updated. With Google Calendar, I can keep all of my data centralized, and, by using Google Calendar sync, I can sync my work calendar with my Google Calendar automatically.
Similarly with email, I’ve setup SMS calendar notifications to be sent to my phone 15 minutes prior to an event starting. This works much in the same way that Outlook notifies me on my desktop at work, and also the way that Windows Mobile’s calendar works. If I need to see a more detailed schedule, I can again launch the browser to view and/or modify my events without having to initiate a syncing process.
Miscellaneous
The phone also has other good features, but the primary thing I wanted to show was the ability of using the Voyager as a smart phone though it lacks features that most smart phones have. In addition, Verizon’s BroadbandAccess plan for smart phones cost $50 a month whereas dumb phones have unlimited web access for $15 month. With this phone, I’ve been able to save money without losing any features of a smart phone.
Until later,
Tom