LG VX9900 enV messaging clamshell

Verizon's strange new clamshell is loaded with media and made for messaging. Will your friends turn green-eyed with envy when they see it?

Design

Like the VX9800 before it, the LG VX9900 enV is both a thick clamshell and a small QWERTY flip phone. Closed, the phone has a small external screen, almost too small for anything but dialing. Open, the internal screen is bright and colorful, but also proportionally small, just over two inches, relative to the open lid, with a large black frame around the screen highlighting the wasted space. The clamshell opens with a snap to two stages: tilted about 135 degrees, and completely open. Speakers flank the screen, and the camera is found on the back of the case. Unlike the Cingular 8525, which swaps nicely between views when you slide out the keyboard, the VX9900 only keeps your work when you open the phone; closing the clamshell quits any open apps and returns you to the standby screen, an annoying design flaw that made calling from the contacts list much more difficult.

Calling - Good

Phone calls are obviously easier to make on the LG VX9900 when the phone is closed. Unfortunately, the external display is so tiny that interacting with the contacts list becomes a chore. The contact fields themselves seem a bit barren; no big deal for a lightweight phone, but disappointing for a hefty messaging phone such as this. Calls sounded good, with only a slight bit of static, and the phone did a great job suppressing background noise as we talked on a busy Manhattan street. The speakerphone is loud and clear, and the phone also supports speaker-independent voice dialing and Bluetooth. In our tests, we got just under four and a quarter hours of talk time; respectable, but about 15 minutes less than promised.

Messaging - Good

The enV does a good -- but not great -- job handling SMS and instant messaging, and this is an area where the phone should shine. The comfortable keyboard is as the one we tested on the Cingular 8525, though the space between keys was a little much for our taste. Symbols are scattered about above the letter and number keys, making them a bit hard to find. Both screens, including the crisp internal screen, seemed a bit small for reading a great deal of text. The external screen showed about 115 characters of an incoming message, which was quite a bit to cram in. The internal showed a full 160 characters with plenty of room to spare. The phone handles instant messaging and e-mail from Hotmail, AOL, and Yahoo, but leaves out some popular e-mail options (such as Gmail).

Part2

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