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LG Voyager Cell Phone Review - Organizer

Alfredo Padilla Published on December 04, 2007 Comment on this

Intro Making/Receiving Calls Software Other Features

Tour & Design Messaging Battery Life Value & Comparisons

Audio Quality Organizer Connectivity Conclusion

Imaging Multimedia Hardware Ratings & Specs

Synchronization Ease of Use (0.0)
The LG Voyager does not come with software that allows you to synchronize the personal information on your phone with a computer. As such it will receive a zero here.

Alerts (2.0)
Alerts on the LG Voyager can only be set for calendar appointments. You have to choose from one of five preset times before an event for the alert to go off, there's no way to set your own custom time. You can customize the ring tone that will sound for each alert individually, and you can choose whether the phone vibrates as well. When an alert sounds the screen lights up and you are prompted to unlock the phone. When you do you have the choice to view the appointment now or later, although unfortunately the Voyager doesn't take advantage of its screen real estate to give you any information about the appointment here, this despite the fact that the full screen is used for the alert dialogue.

When you choose the view later option the alert is snoozed for five minutes and then sounds again with the same options. There's no way to simply dismiss an appointment without actually viewing it. Although we like the customizability of the alert ring tones we found most of the Voyager's alert functionality to be sub par, especially when compared with a full featured smart phone like the HTC Touch.

Over the Air PIM Sync (0.0)
The LG Voyager does not allow you to synchronize personal information over the air.

Address Book

Adding Contacts (8.50)
To see how easy it is to add a contact to the LG Voyager we time how long it takes to go from the home screen unlocked until we have added a contact name and phone number. We do this for five different test contacts and take the average time for our score. The LG Voyager did well in this test, taking an average of 11.76 seconds to add a new contact to the address book. You can see below that only the Pantech Duo put up a similar score, with our other comparison phones taking twice as long or more than the Voyager. We found adding a contact on the LG Voyager to be helped by the use of both the external and internal interfaces. We started by hitting the Address Book icon on the home screen and then tapping the new button to get a new contact started. We then opened the device up to enter the name and phone number, which is faster than dealing with the virtual keypad on the exterior screen.

Cell Phone	Time (sec)	Score
LG Voyager	11.76	8.50
HTC Touch on Sprint	29.42	3.40
Pantech Duo	11.72	8.53
Nokia E90	17.48	5.72
Helio Ocean	21.24	4.71
Apple iPhone	20.86	4.79

Looking/Sorting/Search (5.0)
Contacts on the LG Voyager are organized alphabetically by name. There's only one field for the name, so however you decide to enter it into that field is where it will show up in the list. Although you can assign contacts to groups there's no way to view your contacts by group from the standard contacts interface. Instead, you need to go into the menu, choose contacts from there, and then choose groups from the next list of options. This seems a bit circuitous. You can search through your contacts by hitting the "Go To" button on the exterior screen or just start typing in the interior QWERTY keyboard. Unfortunately this search only applies to the contact name starting with the beginning, so for example Joe Bob will only be found on a search if you start typing "Joe". If you type in "Bob" it won't appear. On the exterior display you also have a bar along the top that divides the alphabet into four sections that you can jump to quickly. We were not impressed by the LG Voyager's sorting and search options for contacts.

Fields (2.2)
When you create a new contact on the LG Voyager you are given a pretty basic selection of eleven fields. These include name, multiple phone numbers, an email address, group, ringtone and picture. This should be sufficient for most users but anyone who wants to manage a large and complex set of contacts on the Voyager will probably feel constrained by the dearth of contact fields. By contrast smart phones like the Nokia E90 or Pantech Duo provide users with 40+ fields.

Speed Dial/Voice tags/Voice command (5.67)
Speed dials are supported on the LG Voyager, with up to 98 slots available. There is no support for voice tags but we found the included voice command software to be pretty good. We're usually fairly unimpressed by voice command on phones, but the Voyager was able to recognize all five of our test contacts, which have diverse names. This leads us to worry less about the lack of voice tag support, where you can train the phone to recognize certain names.

Calendar

Adding Calendar Items (10.78)
To see how easy it is to add a calendar appointment to the LG Voyager we time how long it takes to go from the home screen unlocked until we have added a lunch appointment with a reminder 15 minutes beforehand. We repeat this test five times and take the average for our score. The LG Voyager only took an average of 9.28 seconds to add our test appointment. This is a pretty good score, you can see below that only the HTC Touch was faster than the Voyager on this test, with the Pantech Duo equaling it. The Ocean, E90 and iPhone were all significantly slower. We found ourselves again using a combination of the external and internal interfaces to get this test done. We first tapped the home screen wallpaper to bring up the favorites menu and launched the calendar from there rather than going through the more labyrinthine menu system. We then opened the phone up, navigated to the next day and hit the soft key for new to start entering our information.

Cell Phone	Time (sec)	Score
LG Voyager	9.28	10.78
HTC Touch on Sprint	7.94	12.59
Pantech Duo	9.28	10.78
Nokia E90	16.367	6.11
Helio Ocean	24.2	4.13
Apple iPhone	18.92	5.29

Calendar Views (3.1)
The LG Voyager provides you with three calendar views. The default view is monthly where you see a full month on screen with the currently selected day highlighted in red. At the bottom of the external screen or to the right on the internal screen you see the number of events on a given day. We think this is a little silly, if you're going to set aside that additional space why not give us a list of the actual appointments rather than a count.

Daily	Weekly	Monthly

The weekly view is a typical grid with days along the top and hours along the left. Appointments are blocked out so you an see your free/busy time, but this is really all it's good for as there are no details about any appointment actually provided. The daily view gives you a simple list of the appointments on that day with start time, title and some icons for things like alerts. This is the most useful view in our opinion. Categories are not supported so there's no way to filter your view, nor is there a search feature. Overall the calendar views were pretty disappointing, it certainly isn't as good as the more powerful calendar views you see on smart devices like the T-Mobile Shadow or Nokia E90.

Fields (5.0)
When you create a new calendar appointment on the LG Voyager you only have a few fields to choose from. Title and start/end time is supported, as are alerts and recurrence. The recurrence options only allow you to create some basic recurrence patterns, daily, weekly, monthly or yearly. There's no way to create a custom recurrence pattern nor are there options for things like weekdays or weekends. There also are no advanced fields that are found on smart phones like categories, invitations or notes.

ToDo/Tasks

Adding ToDo/Task (0.0)
The LG Voyager does not support tasks, as such it will receive zeros in these sections.

ToDo/Task Sorting and Prioritizing (0.0)
No tasks program.

Fields (0.0)
No tasks program.

Notes

Adding Notes (4.59)
To see how easy it is to add a note to the LG Voyager we time how long it takes to go from the home screen unlocked until we have created a new standardized note. We repeat this test five times and take the average for our score. The LG Voyager took an average of 10.9 seconds to add our test note. This isn't the fastest we've seen, but it's pretty good. You can see below that it's faster than any of our comparison phones except the Pantech Duo. Unlike the other timed tests in this section we weren't able to use a shortcut on the exterior display to launch the notes program. Instead we had to burrow into the menu system, which took most of our time. For this reason we found it faster to just open the phone up and use the D-Pad and soft keys to get the notes program launched rather than using the exterior touch screen.

Cell Phone	Time (sec)	Score
LG Voyager	10.9	4.59
HTC Touch on Sprint	17.64	2.83
Pantech Duo	9.82	5.09
Nokia E90	16.73	2.99
Helio Ocean	16.06	3.11
Apple iPhone	12.66	3.95

Note Interface (3.0)
The notes interface on the LG Voyager is pretty simple. There is a list of notes with the newest at the top. There is one button assigned to create a new note and another to erase all notes, in the interior interface these are the functions assigned to the soft key. When you open an existing note you are shown what is in the note but have to press another button to edit it. Another button in this view is assigned to delete just this specific note. When composing a note one button allows you to insert symbols while another brings up a menu where you can cancel the edit or copy/cut text. Overall the interface is simple and straightforward due to the lack of many menus. On the other hand we find the three step process to edit an existing note to be a little clunky.

Note Formatting (1.0)
The notes program on the LG Voyager doesn't allow you to edit the font type or size, nor can you do things like bold, underline or italicize text. You can however add symbols and copy/cut text, which are nice extras that aren't often found in notes programs. As such we are awarding the LG Voyager a point in this section.

Voice Memo (0.0)
Unlike most phones the LG Voyager does not allow you to create voice notes. This might be understandable in an entry level phone, but in a $300 device it's a silly oversight.

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