Finally a really good phone

I have been on an insane search for the right service/phone for the last year after returning from living in Honduras for the last 15 years.  I tried all the main phone services 2 or 3 times and went through 2 or 3 phones with each service.  I did decide on a Blackberry and T-Mobile.  I don't like paying 30 dollars a month for the Blackberry service.  T-Mobile seems to drop a lot of call especially when calling through their @Home Wifi feature.  Most of my friends are on Verizon so I have switched to Verizon.  I tried the Krave, Glyde (new resistive screen) and then jumped 4 times in price to the Versa.  I am very glad I did.  I am having some driver issues with my Mac and Mac running XP on Parallels that I did not have with the Glyde but I figure that will be fixed on the first firmware upgrade or driver release.

I love the features, the screen, the keyboard, closing the keyboard and it auto locks, the cube effect between screens, good calendar, calculator, tip calculator, world clock, etc.

It multi-tasks so I can listen to music while doing almost everything.  If I make a call or use the navigator the music stops.  When I exit the app the music starts where it left off.  I can text and do most other functions and the music plays in the background.  When the music is playing it puts a ribbon across the top which blocks some of the icons under it but you can move the icons to get them out of the way.  When you receive a text the music stops and while reading the text the music does not continue until the text screen is exited.  Seems like that is something that should be fixed.

The voice commands do not seem to work very well except for using it to make calls.  I could not get the right song to play and when I said goto navigator every time it goes to the calculator.

The internet browser works as expected for a phone.  I would like to have seen a floating magnifier.  You have to do 2 clicks and a slide to magnify the entire page and then rub the screen until the part of the page desired is shown.  This works fine but seems like fewer clicks could be designed.

The navigator is the typical VZNavigator with its inherited cut-down features compared to a real gps.  It depends on a Verizon network connections for maps but has a good gps for location tracking.  I have 30 days free then I will activate the subscription for a month when traveling.

The user interface was very well thought out.  There are a lot of features and shortcuts.  I love the way you can locate a contact quickly.  The favorites screen for adding contacts is very convenient.  I wish the media screen allowed a play list to be added to it or an album. 

The camera has a flash and they cut back a bit from the Dare as it is 2mp instead of 3mp.  What is a phone camera for anyway?  It is unlikely you will win the photography Pulitzer award with a phone camera but then again who knows.  I use my camera to take photos of faces for my contacts and that is pretty much it.  There are plenty of features with the camera including a panoramic mode that allows you to take 3 shots to form a panoramic view.  It shows you the right edge of the previous shot so you can align the next shot.  Now if the world would just hold still long enough to get the next shot.  The focus to shot time is really long at about 2-3 seconds and the lens is way to slow for an action shot.  You can turn the autofocus off, there is a timer, auto save on/off, face detection, spot or average focus, 3 shutter sounds or no shutter sound, white balance, change resolution.  The video works well for a phone camera. 

The speaker is loud but only a mono speaker.  The bluetooth works perfectly.  The rings are very loud and a lot to choose from.  You can easily add your own ring tones with the USB Mass Storage mode on a Mac, Linux, or ... what was that other abstract operating system out there?  WinDose or something like that.

You will not make a fashion statement with this phone as the case is mud ugly.  The nice thing is that it protects the phone.  Sure would have been nice if they had provided a place for the included stylus.  I guess that stylus was an afterthought. 

The contacts are always available.  The contact program is a bit light as it does not have the ability to put the address in.  That would be really handy and especially if it was linked to the navigator. 

The keyboard is just awesome.  It has plenty of room for big fingers and all the standard symbols are available right on the keyboard. 

The reception seems to be very good.  I noticed that I am getting 1 to 2 bars more than with the Glyde and about the same as the Krave.

There is no such thing as a perfect phone but this one is worth the extra money.  Have you noticed that the ones that are cheap are the ones that everyone is having problems with?  You can get a Glyde online for 50 dollars.  The new Glyde with the resistive screen may be worth the 50 dollars if you really only want to talk on the phone and do not care about the other features.  Then the other features become a bonus.  If you want a phone that you can talk on and actually use for music, browsing, quick texting, and limited navigation then the Versa seems to be a good choice.

Two suggestions I can think of for a firmware upgrade are:
1. Copy/Paste (since the Versa doesn't keep cookies for very long, it would be nice to have a copy/paste option so I don't have to re-type my user name and password 100 times a week).
2. While preparing a text and inserting a number/contact, there should be an option to insert "recent" as I would use this more then "contact" or "new #"
(A third enhancement I just thought of would be for all homescreens to rotate when an attachment is not present)
IMO, then the Versa would be an "ultimate phone"

Glad it was helpful!  I somehow or another came across the rocker-zoom tip on HoFo when I was still trying to decide Versa/Dare a little while back.  I couldn't find it in their tips/tricks thread either now that you mention it, but I made a post on these two features (vol rocker zoom + thumbnail scroll) in the Tips & Tricks section here on LG-Versa.org at your suggestion in case the info is of help to others as well.