Review: LG Dare

The Dare is a 3 inch touchscreen phone carried by Verizon Wireless. It's made by LG, weighs about 3.8 ounces, is feature-packed, and comes in at $129.

Physical Features

The Dare features a 3 inch 240 x 400 pixel display, a 3.2 megapixel camera with flash, MicroSD card slot, recessed headphone jack, volume controls, and lock and speaker keys. On the front, their are only 3 buttons on the bottom: call button, clear/voice command, and the end call/power button. It has a relatively nice weight and feel to it in addition to a solid and slim design. The reflective screen, shiny bezel, and metal keys make it seem like a luxury product rather than the cheap looking phone in the Verizon advertisments. From an aesthetic stanpoint, it is the iPhone's cousin albeit a smaller screen.

Display

Despite its 240 x 400 resolution, the images displayed by the Dare look really great and crisp. The camera takes very good quality photos and the flash is an added bonus. When viewing pictures taken by the camera, the images appear blurry and inaccurate, however they quickly refocus and display sharp colors. Another notable feature of the Dare is an accelerometer which changes the photo to landscape mode when turned sideways. The video quality wasn't as vivid as the photos it took, although most phones do take crappy videos.

The Dare has 2 display themes: a white backround with lopsided and moveable icons and a black theme with standard and stationary icons. It has a variety of menu fonts for a more customizeable user interface, and various dial fonts, clock formats, and wallpaper animations. Another notable feature of the Dare is that it has haptic feedback which gives a short vibration when the screen is touched to give more accurate feedback to the user. Personally, the touch-sensitive feedback was pretty annoying so I turned it off in the Settings & Tools menu.

Software

The user interface is pretty intuitive, although there is a bit of a learning curve to this device. On the home screen, there are 5 icons on the bottom that represent the inbox, dial pad, main menu, contacts list, and favorites. Above it is the time, day, date and the banner if you choose to have one. Near the top right of the screen is an arrow that show 11 shortcuts when pressed. These shortcuts can be changed to adapt to other people's personal tastes, and they can be dragged out onto the home screen for quick and easy access. With a slimmed down design, the screen real estate got smaller as well. Some options are smaller and some are larger which is an inconsistent feature. The interface isn't as smooth or as elegant as the iPhone's, however it isn't too much of a hinderance. However, sometimes keys have to be pressed rather forcefully for the application to work. Scrolling through contacts is only easy when you know the optimal way of swiping to scroll easily.

In the Tools menu, there are a hoard of features that can be useful to almost every user. Some of the most useful ones are the Ez Tip Calculator, Alarm Clock, Stopwatch, Notepad, and Drawing Pad. The Dare also comes with voice commands, a calculator, calender, world clock, and USB mass storage. It has Bluetooth 2.1 and the call quality is quite decent.

Final Thoughts

Overall, the Dare is a easy to use phone with a striking design. The phone is not for everyone however, as its software is crippled with inconsistent responses and application sizes. Owning this phone for a few weeks, I've come to appreciate the feature-packed aspects and believe that they outweigh the minor inconsistencies.

8/10