LG Dare is a wireless phone that had been available on Verizon Wireless. The LG Versa has since replaced it, though it is a little dated, as well. When it was released, it was originally being marketed as a competitor to the iPhone despite not being a smartphone at all. While it does have some fairly advanced media capabilities, high speed access, and other features to make it a very nice device, it was clearly not a competitor to the iPhone. Verizon’s marketing for the Dare did not last long as it was quickly overshadowed by the Blackberry Storm. But, enough with the random information. I am now retiring my LG Dare as it is being replaced by a HTC Droid Eris, so I will give it an exit review.
To start off, the Dare was not a smartphone, as I had already mentioned. However, it has a browser that renders HTML, and some other advanced functionality that made it feel more like a cheap smartphone-ish device. The only thing that it didn’t have to complete the smartphone feel was synchronization. You can’t sync it with anything, pretty much. Some third party applications were released to address this, but, unfortunately, I never tried them.
On release, the software on the Dare was not entirely stable. However, LG and Verizon did release a couple of updates and it did become more stable. The software provided a lot of functionality. There were the various standard features regular wireless phones would have, like a calendar, contacts management, etc, plus it had an advanced media player. The Dare had no real file management system, so if you put a lot of music on it, you could not organize with directories. This is a huge problem on pretty much all regular wireless phones. Using the interface was actually quite intuitive, and it provided for some limited customization. Managing contacts, favorites, etc, was reasonably easy, and in my opinion, surpassed many wireless phones.
The display, for a phone, was pretty nice. Being a full touch screen device, everything was done through the screen, including typing, dialing, and interacting with the tools. The touchscreen was a resistive type touchscreen so it wasn’t entirely easy to use, so accuracy was a bit of a problem. However, successive firmware updates addressed accuracy problems pretty well. The display was pretty bright, as I had to turn it down to a more comfortable level. It was also visible in sunlight. The screen was covered with a soft plastic so it could easily be scratched, so a screen protector was a must. Many people recommended expensive protection that could cost upwards to $50. I used one screen protector from the $10 3 pack from Verizon.
Performance was actually quite good, and I’m referring to the overall performance, including central processing, network, graphics, etc. It’s not the fastest device around, as some things were sluggish, but the interface was quite fluid for the most part. I experienced no performance problems with any of the applications and games I used, nor with media playback.
Speaking of media playback, this is one place where the Dare kinda falls flat. Managing media is a huge pain, since there is no way to implement an organizational structure of your media using directories. Also, whoever was responsible for programming the mixer for audio was not someone familiar with audio because the audio was terrible. The sound quality could be good if you could pick a good audio preset, but there was no way to manually tweak the audio for better sound. Also, the media player has absolutely no normalization, so if your music is not normalized, you might run into one track that’s very quiet, and the next very loud.
Available games and applications was very disappointing. All indications pointed to big things coming to the Dare, but that fell way short. Some decent games were released, some of which used the accelerometer and other features. Some of the stuff I saw, however, was very piss poor and obviously hacked together just to get it out of the way. I don’t really blame the Dare for this since, on the Verizon network, it’s limited to running Brew applications that are only approved by Verizon. This is a HUGE shortcoming of almost all devices on Verizon’s network. I’ve heard rumor that this limitation may soon come to an end, though, but I’m not sure how credible this is. Unfortunately, the apps support for the Dare, because of this, was a huge disappointment.
One big plus for the Dare, however, is it had some extreme battery life. Up until I retired it, it could go days on a single charge. Before my switch to the Droid Eris, I had not charged it for 3 days and it still showed enough life to make it through the day. I had not replaced the battery the entire time I owned the Dare and never really had any problems with battery life. There were times where I could only make it maybe a couple days, but those were heavy use days. It appears this is something I will be missing as the Droid Eris will not have such impressive battery life.
Another rather impressive feature was the camera. While it was advertised with flash, it didn’t really have a flash. However, for a phone camera, it was one of the best I’ve used. It was 3.2 megapixel, which was massive at the time the Dare was released. It could take pretty good pictures, and could record video. I managed to snag some pictures of some hot air balloons at a festival in low light with some decent quality. They’re not in my image gallery, though. A surprising feature for video recording that I found was the high speed recording, where it would record at 120fps then save it as a 10fps video. 10fps sounds like it’s too low since normal video is around 30fps, but when you record at 120fps then play back at 10fps, it actually looks fluid. I actually used this feature to record the firing of a handgun. It’s not exactly as good as watching the thousand fps videos, but it’s still cool.
Overall, the Dare was a nice device, but it was severely limited by the provider. I think it could have been more of a success. I also suspect it had enough horsepower to run as a smartphone, but maybe a budget smartphone. It would have been kinda nice to be able to hack Android onto it and continue using it, but it’s time to be retired. The touchscreen is using last year’s technology, and by now it’s probably on the slow side on core processing.
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