Today, Verizon unveiled its
new fall lineup of phones, the highlight of which,
the LG Voyager, takes aim squarely at the
iPhone. Sure, it's a dead ringer for Apple's Jesus phone, but it's those similarities as well as some significant differences that make the Voyager a suitable alternative to Apple's handset -- at least for those of us Verizon customers not interested in jumping ship for AT&T.
The similarities between the phones don't end with the slick black case. They both have a 2 megapixel camera in common as well as a touch screen, which on the Voyager, runs the slickest, most user-friendly interface we've ever seen on a Verizon or LG handset (it's actually based on the one used for the LG Prada Phone). Of course, there's e-mail and text messaging like there is on the iPhone.
It's what the Voyager does differently that's got us excited. First of all, it runs on Verizon's high-speed EV-DO network, which is significantly speedier than the AT&T EDGE network the iPhone is chained to. Voyager also has GPS, which is lacking on the iPhone. It doesn't have a hard drive like iPhone does, but it does have a slot for a microSDHC card, which currently top out at 8 gigabytes but will soon be achieving capacities of up to 32 gigabytes.
Lastly, the Voyager is actually clamshell phone, hiding a second (giant) screen and full QWERTY keyboard under it exterior. Our pals at
Engadget Mobile got their hands on the Voyager this morning, and while they say the Voyager is a bit meaty in size, they're equally as impressed with it as we are. No price has been announced, but expect to see the Voyager in stores around Thanksgiving.
In addition to the Voyager, Verizon announced that is will carry the
BlackBerry Pearl -- no different than what you get from other providers -- and the
Samsung Juke, which is positioned as an entry-level music phone with its click wheel and 2 gigabytes of built-in storage.
There's also a second LG phone,
the Venus, which puts an interesting spin on the touch screen craze –- whether good or bad remains to be seen. The screen is actually split into two parts, and only the bottom half is a touch screen. The top half is your standard cell phone screen, the content/context of which changes the buttons displayed on the lower half.
For more, check out
Engadget Mobile's in-depth photo galleries of the new launches.
From
Engadget MobileRelated Links:
_thumbnail.jpg "Vintage Keyboards")
