Verizon LG EnV Review

I bought the Verizon LG enV phone in August to replace my Motorola E815. I was looking for something top of the line and fun. Here are the positives and negatives of having the enV. The reception is very good when speaking on speaker phone. I conducted a test amongst the competitor phones at the Verizon Wireless store before I made my decision. The still photo/ video camera takes fairly decent portrait pictures and semi decent short movies. However, one cannot place the phone flat on a surface because the lens on the camera protrudes out of the back. The enV can also be synched with email, except there is a 15 minute delay on getting incoming emails. The mp3 player is fairly decent for a phone, but it is not as good as the chocolate. For example, when I first loaded songs into the phone on a micro SD card, I could not understand why certain songs were not detected in the music library. It was not until further experimentation that the songs did not appear in the library because the file names were too many characters. This was a simple fix of merely shortening the file names. The main reason I bought this phone was because of the clear reception. The secondary reason was that I wanted a full QWERTY keyboard so I could text people and write in my calendar. Unfortunately, the enV calendar does not sync with my calendar on my computer so I have to enter appointments twice. There are other features on the enV that I have yet to explore such as Verizon's GPS Navigator system and VCast. The battery life of the phone is pretty consistent. I can talk for a good 3-4 hours before it needs charging. Or I can listen to 2 hours of music before it needs charging. The biggest thing that bothers me is that the alarm clock turns off by itself after 30 minutes. There have been times when I did not hear the alarm and it just shut off so I did not wake up until my body was ready. On the E815, that alarm would keep going until it was turned off. The alarm clock menu allows the user to have 3 different alarm times. I set all three of them for different times to wake me up in the morning and sometimes I won't hear any of them. Another mysterious function on the phone is that some of the calls I make do not appear in the recent call list if that number is already in the recent call list multiple times. I used to keep track of all my phone usage to verify it with the phone bill but since some of the calls don't show up and I don't write it down right after making the call I just can't keep track anymore.

As a result, I would not recommend this phone to anybody who needs a decent alarm clock and access to their email right away. But if you can deal with those things and like that the phone flips open to reveal a text message keyboard and fairly decent sized screen, this might be the phone for you.