LG enV2 Cell Phone Review - Multimedia
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Alfredo Padilla Published on May 09, 2008 Comment on this |
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The LG enV2 is a music oriented handset and it does a resonable job, but we have to say we're not fond of the Verizon V Cast music software. On the video front we liked the reasonably sized screen and decent video controls, but the software for organizing video isn't up to snuff. |
The fastest way to get music playing on the LG enV2 is to hit the music button on the front of the device and then hit the center select key to Play All. This took an average of 4.3 seconds in our test, which isn't particularly speedy. The most time was taken while the phone actually loaded the music software. Once it was launched getting a song to play was quite quick. Still, the LG enV2's performance wasn't terrible, you can see below that it was actually faster than average, but you can also see that a couple of our comparison phones, the Samsung SLM and Sidekick LX, both performed significantly faster. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.
Dedicated Music Controls (6.0)
While music is playing on the LG enV2 the external control keys allow you to control music playback. The OK button acts as a play/pause button, up takes you to the next track and down takes you to the previous track. The volume keys also control music volume. There's no way to send the music program to the background on the enV2 so that isn't an issue. This is a decent amount of control, anything more will require that you open the device up, however.
music playing (interior display)
Music Software Functionality and Organization (5.8)
The LG enV2 uses Verizon's music software, which does a solid job but could be better. Playlists are supported if you synchronize them from your desktop and you can create and edit playlists on the device. Unfortunately standard .pls and .m3u playlists we placed on the device were not recognized. Tags for Mp3, AAC and WMA music files were all recognized correctly. Music can be viewed by genre, album, artist or title. You can also search for music on the device.
Background play is not supported, so you can't do anything else while music is playing, and neither are ratings or visualizations. Your music library is automatically updated with any songs you put on the memory card in the My Music folder. Album art is supported as long as it is embedded in the file. It won't pick up album art that is saved as a separate image file on the memory card.
Our biggest issue with the V Cast music software has been and still is its layout. At the top of the screen you have a grey bar with three controls: Home, Search and Help. Below this everything is red, with a graphic separating the grey bar from two columns of commands that allow you to navigate through your music. For many the grey bar will appear to not even be part of the interface. We also found it annoying that once a song was playing navigating to another part of the interface will stop the playback. We understand that some phones aren't powerful enough to support multi-tasking, but you certainly should be able to have music playing while you're adding other songs to the playlist, for example.
Overall the V Cast music software provides solid functionality but Verizon should go back to the drawing board in regards to user experience. If they want their phones to be taken seriously as music devices they need to do a better job.
Online Song Downloading (7.0)
You can download songs directly to the LG enV2 from Verizon's V Cast music store. The music store is built into the music software, you can use the left soft key to toggle between the two. As with the music software we didn't find the experience of purchasing music to be particularly impressive. In particular once you get into the store a bit it's a pain to get back to the music player. Also the search feature didn't do a very good job finding the songs we were looking for. Our other major grip about the V Cast music store is pricing, at $1.99 per song it's twice as expensive as Sprint's music store and online retailers.
V Cast music store
Streaming (0.0)
The LG enV2 does not support streaming Mp3, Windows Media or Real Audio from the web. There are some streaming audio services available from Verizon, but you'll have to pay for these.
Podcast Support (0.0)
There is no support on the LG enV2 for downloading or organizing podcasts.
Music Sync with PC (0.0)
The LG enV2 does not support synchronization of music between your PC and the phone. It doesn't even ship with a data cable to facilitate this. Instead you'll have to pull out the Micro SD card and use a card reader to move songs onto it manually.
Music Formats and DRM (3.5)
The LG enV2 supports WMA, Mp3 and AAC music files. The only form of DRM it supports is Verizon's proprietary format that is used for their Music Store.
Music Interruption (10.0)
The LG enV2 does a solid job when a call interrupts music. The music is automatically paused so you can take or reject the call. When the call is completed it waits for a few seconds so you can see the call details and then goes back to playing music from the point at which it was interrupted. About our only annoyance was that the end and start of the music was a little abrupt, it would have been nice to get a nice fade out/in effect like the iPhone has.
Video Software Access (0.0)
It took us 4.2 seconds to get a video playing on the LG enV2, which is a pretty speedy time. You can see below that it's almost three seconds faster than the average time for a phone and amongst our comparison devices only the LG Voyager did better. This despite the fact that we had to opend the phone and go deep into the menu system to get a video playing. We were quite pleased with the enV2's performance in this test. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.
Video Controls (8.0)
Video playback controls on the LG enV2 are straightforward and well laid out. The D-Pad is the center of playback control with the center select button controlling play/pause, up taking the video full screen and down stopping the video. Left and right fulfill dual purposes with a single press in either direction moving to the next or previous video while holding them down will fast forward or rewind. The left soft key is assigned to the mute function while the right soft key opens a menu with only two options: set the video as wallpaper and get file info. The volume keys do their thing, of course. Overall we were quite pleased with the ease of use. We were particularly happy that unlike some other phones all the controls were unique and useful.
video playback interface
Video Software & Organization (1.5)
The video software on the LG enV2 is not particularly sophisticated, basically it's just the album software as it's really just there so you can view videos you record on the enV2. When launched you get a grid of 3 x 2 video thumbnails. The left soft key is assigned to erase the selected clip while the right soft key opens a menu with additional options like recording a new video or managing your videos, which basically means selecting multiple videos for deletion or to be moved.
video software
There's no support for more advanced features like playlists, genres, or ratings. You can't even create folders to organize your videos better. Although the decent size of the enV2's screen and the good video controls may lead you to want to use the device as a video player, the organizational features aren't going to be as good as on more advanced devices like the SMT5800, which uses Windows Media Player Mobile.
Video Sync with PC (0.0)
As with music synchronization there's no data cable so you'll have to pull out the card and put videos in the My Videos folder on it using a card reader.
Video Formats (5.0)
The LG enV2 was able to play back all three of our 3GP encoded video and our Mpeg-4 and H264 encoded videos. It does not support Flash, Quicktime or Real video.
Video DRM (0.0)
The LG enV2 does not support any form of video DRM.
Video Playback Smoothness (10.0)
We were pleased to see that the LG enV2 was able to play back all five of our video test files, with bitrates up to 768 kbps. This means you can watch reasonably high quality video on the enV2.
Online Video Downloading (0.0)
The enV2 does not support any direct video download services.
Video Streaming unscored
As there is no standardization of mobile video streaming we don't score this section, but we do look at several services to see if the device can handle them. Unfortunately the LG enV2 was unable to play videos from any of the services we test like Youtube Mobile, Zoovision.com or Windowsmedia.com. Verion has its own V Cast streaming video service with various content available, but like so many things from Verizon you'll have to pay for it.
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