LG Venus Cell Phone Review

If you are looking for a unique phone to complement your style, the LG Venus could be what you are looking for. It features a QVGA display screen which can be operated via a secondary dynamic touch LCD control pad located below it

The main screen is an ordinary TFT screen with a nice 262k colors and a resolution of 320x240. This is accompanied by what LG have name their 'InteractPad™' which is a contextual touch screen interface with a resolution of 240x176. The InteractPad provides the main mechanism to navigate the phone, and the softkey menus appearing will change depending on the options available. For example, when you are listening to music, soft keys like Play, Pause, Forward and Backward will appear on the InteractPad. Otherwise when browsing through the menus, you will see Up, Down and Okay soft keys.

The LG Venus, whilst having everything you need in its touch screen and TFT section, also has a slide our numerical keypad. This is because LG found that people enjoy touch screens, but found it hard to text on them, so they are offering a bit of both worlds.

Perhaps because it has a quite unique dual screen, the operating system offered has to be unique to the phone. As such, you don't get the ability to extend functionality in comparison to a phone running a Symbian or Windows Mobile operating system, but it does support Java so you should be able to find a nice range of applications to do the work you need. Bundled with the phone are built in hands free software, video and photo albums, and voice memo ability - not bad, but perhaps not the most feature-rich phone on the market either.

Although the LG Venus supports the 3G network, it lacks WiFi connectivity - this shouldn't be a problem with a good date package.. Battery life is not a concern as the LG Venus has up to 20 days standby time and 4 hours of talk time.

Unfortunately, the camera is pretty featureless - 2.0MP, with no autofocus, flash, and no zoom (either optical or digital), but can record videos. Photos are taken at a 1600x1200 resolution.
The audio player on the phone supports the formats you'd expect it to; AAC, eAAC, and MP3 - not too diverse, but there are enough functions to choose from. Videos can be played back in the popular MPEG4 format. Whatever memory format you choose, the 64Mb will only fit a few songs - luckily this can be expanded by the use of a MicroSD card up to a size of 2GB.

All in all, this phone seems to be one that focuses on style and ease of use rather than good hardware, and there are plenty of phones out there with much more to offer. But, for its price, it seems that you can't go too far wrong with an LG Venus.

by Sam Lee:Goarticles.com