LG Venus Cell Phone Review - Organizer
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Mark Brezinski Published on December 05, 2007 Comment on this |
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Synchronization Ease of Use (0.0)
The synchronization software for the LG Venus is strictly for music; there are no PIM synchronization options.
Alerts (4.0)
Alerts on the Venus are typically well executed. The phone will ring for a solid minute if it isn't answered. At this point it will auto-snooze and ring again in five minutes. Furthermore, you can add vibrate to the alert for added attention grabbing. The bad end of it is that the on-screen reminder is virtually invisible, because it is displayed in the D-pad area and is simply white text on the normal gray background. If you're listing to music, it isn't likely to catch your attention much.
Over the Air PIM Sync (0.0)
The Venus doesn't support over the air PIM synchronization.
Address Book
Adding Contacts (6.95)
All of the timing tests in the organizer section of our reviews are virtually the same. We start with the phone closed and unlocked, and end as soon as we finish a simple entry. In this case, said entry is a contact which consists of a name and number.
The Venus did this rather fast: 14.38 seconds. For some odd reason, the process felt on the slow side of average. This is probably because of the lag we encountered transitioning from dialing to the contacts application. We'll have to take the timer's word for it. Some time was probably saved by the single name field. All we had to do was press space and keep on typing as opposed to shifting our grip to get to the touch screen.
| Cell Phone | Time (sec) | Score |
| LG Venus | 14.38 | 6.95 |
| LG Chocolate VX8550 | 20.5 | 4.88 |
| Apple iPhone | 20.86 | 4.79 |
| HTC Touch | 29.42 | 3.40 |
| Razr2 V9m | 19.26 | 5.19 |
| Samsung Juke | 14.57 | 6.86 |
Looking/Sorting/Search (1.5)
Contacts are organized alphabetically by name. This is a bit of an issue as there is only one name field on the phone; if you want your contacts to be organized by last name, you'll have to input their last name first. You can search through names using the multitap search bar at the bottom, but it won't pick up on fragments within the name field. This is incredibly disappointing, as the search provided in the notes application will allow you to search for fragments. We're not sure why LG seems to like giving their contacts program worse search functionality than their notepad application as we noted the same thing in the LG Chocolate VX8550.
There are no options for sorting. While groups can be assigned to contacts, there aren't any options for filtering based on them. Many phone have far better options in this category, both those in the same class as the Venus, and cheaper phones.
Fields (2.2)
Speed Dial/Voice tags/Voice command (5.67)
The Venus does pretty well in this category. While it doesn't have voice tags (very few phones do), it does have great voice command software and about 95 speed dial values you can assign (four are taken up by system shortcuts, like voicemail and bill information). The voice recognition software caught all five of our test names without issue, and had a pleasing voice itself.
Calendar
Adding Calendar Items (5.30)
It took the Venus about 18.87 seconds to add our test calendar item. This isn't the fastest time, mainly due to the menu navigation necessary to get to the application. It sets a reminder 15 minutes before the event as a default, and as this is one of the criterion for our test entry, it saved us a bit of navigation (which translates to a few seconds of time). As a general rule of thumb, the Venus takes a bit of time to get where it needs to go. As you can see below this performance is nowhere near as good as what we managed with the Chocolate.
| Cell Phone | Time (sec) | Score |
| LG Venus | 18.87 | 5.30 |
| LG Chocolate VX8550 | 6.48 | 15.43 |
| Apple iPhone | 18.92 | 5.29 |
| HTC Touch | 7.94 | 12.59 |
| Razr2 V9m | 14.48 | 6.91 |
| Samsung Juke | 13.72 | 7.29 |
Calendar Views ( 4.89)
The Venus has three different calendar views: day, week, and month. It lacks an agenda or year view.
This was another area where we were utterly underwhelmed. For a device that looks like it was meant for business professionals, it certainly doesn't provide good business functionality.
Fields (5.0)
ToDo/Tasks
Adding ToDo/Task (0.0)
The Venus can't create tasks, which will result in exactly four zeroes.
ToDo/Task Sorting and Prioritizing (0.0)
N/A: Can't create tasks.
Fields (0.0)
N/A: Can't create tasks.
Notes
Adding Notes (2.65)
In a stunning display of foot-dragging, the Venus took 18.86 seconds to type out "Lunch 12pm tomorrow" in the notes application. This was partly due to menu lag, but also due to the inability to set T9 as the default text entry mode. This meant additional menu navigation during the test, and it took about a second before we could actually type.
| Cell Phone | Time (sec) | Score |
| LG Venus | 18.86 | 2.65 |
| LG Chocolate VX8550 | 13.73 | 3.64 |
| Apple iPhone | 12.66 | 3.95 |
| HTC Touch | 17.64 | 2.83 |
| Razr2 V9m | 13.96 | 3.58 |
| Samsung Juke | 16 | 3.13 |
Note Interface (2.0)
Note Formatting (0.0)
There aren't any options for formatting notes. We would've liked to see at least some options here, especially given the formatting resources available in text message creation.
Voice Memo (6.0)
Voice memos might be a little hard to find; it's located in the My Sounds folder as opposed to the regular notes program in that is found in the Tools menu. The voice notes application can record only a minute at a time, but strangely keeps a zero in the tens
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