| LG Dare Silver Phone (Verizon Wireless) | 
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| Buy New: Too low to display
Avg. Customer Rating:   (based on 23 reviews)
Sales Rank: 619
Category: Wireless
Publisher: Verizon Wireless
Studio: Verizon Wireless
Brand: LG
Label: Verizon Wireless
Color: Silver
Media: Wireless Phone
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0
Dimensions (in): 0 x 0 x 0
Model: LG-VX9700
UPC: 652810813877
ASIN: B001BZK5EE
Release Date: July 3, 2008
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Features:
| • | Multimedia-oriented smartphone boasting spacious 3-inch touchscreen with handwriting recognition | | • | Access Verizon's V Cast Music and Video service via fast EV-DO data network; GPS-enabled for turn-by-turn directions | | • | 3.2-megapixel camera/camcorder with Schneider-Kreuznach lens; Bluetooth stereo streaming; MicroSD expansion up to 8 GB | | • | Up to 4.7 hours of talk time, up to 360 hours (15 days) of standby time; measures 4.1 x 2.2 x 0.5 inches (HxWxD) | | • | Includes: Handset, travel adapter/USB cable, user guide, quick reference guide, music CD |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Product Description
The LG Dare for Verizon dares to be different with its bold looks and advanced capabilities--boasting a spacious three-inch touchscreen with handwriting recognition, a 3.2-megapixel camera with face detection and flash, and unique in-phone photo editing capabilities. It's compatible with the V Cast Music and V CAST Music with Rhapsody services, which enables you to purchase songs through your phone and download them via Verizon's fast EV-DO data network. Other features include stereo Bluetooth streaming, MicroSD memory expansion up to 8 GB, access to your mobile email, and up to 4.7 hours of talk time. 
Enjoy easy touchscreen navigation, stereo Bluetooth streaming, high-quality photos and videos from the 3.2-megapixel lens, and access to your mobile email. | Verizon Service Options
With support for the EV-DO high-speed data standard, you'll enjoy fast access to the Internet and Verizon's multimedia services (additional charges applicable), with average download speeds ranging from 400 to 700 Kbps and peak rates up to 2 Mbps. (Learn more about where EV-DO coverage is offered.) The V Cast Music service enables you to download songs instantly to your phone, or purchase music through your PC and transfer the files to your phone. If purchased from your phone, you'll receive two copies of the song: a Windows Media Audio Pro Plus format at 64Kbps stereo is sent to your phone, and a Windows Media Audio 9 format at 160Kbps stereo is sent to your account in the V CAST Music online store for downloading to your PC. V Cast Music offers nearly 2 million songs, with more being added all the time. In addition to the V Cast Music service, this phone is also compatible with Verizon's V CAST Music with Rhapsody, which enables you to access this exclusive digital music service for RealNetworks and for MTV Networks. V CAST Music with Rhapsody delivers unlimited monthly access to music on up to three Rhapsody-compatible mobile phones and players and online on multiple PCs and Web browsers. In addition, customers who purchase music over-the-air are able to download the master copy of the songs or albums to their PCs free of digital rights management (DRM) software that restricts how and where music can be played. The V Cast Video service enables you to stream or download video clips to your phone from a variety of news, entertainment, sports, and weather channels, including CNN, ABC News, E!, CBS Sports, The Weather Channel, and VH1. Verizon's Mobile eMail gives you access to your Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and AOL accounts so you can read, write, and reply. Access your address book, receive e-mail alerts and more, right on your Verizon Wireless phone. With this GPS-enabled phone, you'll be able to access Verizon's VZ Navigator service (additional charges applicable) for voice-prompted turn-by-turn directions, heads-up alerts, local search of nearly 14 million points of interest in the US (such as landmarks, restaurants and ATMs), and detailed color maps. Phone Features
Measuring just 0.5 inches thin and weighing 3.76 ounces, the LG Dare feels lightly comfortable in your pocket. It features a large 3-inch touchscreen that recognizes your handwriting and provides tactile feedback when pressing onscreen buttons or typing on the onscreen QWERTY keyboard. The display has a 240 x 400-pixel resolution and support for 262K colors, and its home screen has several shortcut icons including your messaging inbox, phonebook, favorites menu. The phone provides just three buttons on the bottom of its face for send, end and clearing calls, and it has a stainless steel border along its sides and black soft touch surface on the back. The phone has an internal 148 MB memory, which can be expanded via optional MicroSD memory cards up to 8 GB in size. It can store up to 1000 contact entries, with fields for five numbers per contact. It connects to your PC via USB, and it offers USB mass storage capabilities. The 3.2-megapixel camera with Schneider-Kreuznach certified lens offers several resolution options, ranging from 2048 x 1536 pixels to QVGA 320 x 240 pixels--perfect for sending via MMS messaging. It offers advanced features including face detection, SmartPic Technology (which helps to compensate face color), four ISO settings, six preset scense, panorama and split shot capabilities, white balance settings, multi-shot, and multiple color effects. It also features a flash, self-timer, and multiple shutter sounds (including off). Once you've snapped your photo, you can edit it right in the Dare--zoom, rotate, crop, add frames, or add writing over the image. You can also capture video up to 640 x 480 pixels for storing onto a memory card, or QCIF 176 x 144-pixel resolution for sending via MMS. You can record videos up to 120 frames per second (fps) and then play them back on the Dare at a slow motion rate of 15 fps. This phone provides the latest version of Bluetooth connectivity--version 2.1 + EDR (Enhanced Data Rate), which makes pairing with the included headset as well as other Bluetooth devices a snap. And with EDR, you'll get a faster connection than with the previous version 1.2, which makes transferring files and using the phone as a modem for your laptop hum along nicely. And with the embedded A2DP Bluetooth profile, you can stream your music to a pair of Bluetooth stereo headphones or other compatible devices. 
The lightweight LG Dare measures just 0.5 inches thin. | In addition to compatibility with formats offered by Verizon's V CAST Music and CAST Music with Rhapsody services, it's also compatible with unprotected MP3, WMA, and AAC/AAC+ formats. The digital audio player features a preset sound effect equalizer, ability to create and manage playlists on the phone, and backbround music mode that allows you to multitask (write email, check your calendar, surf the Web) while continuing to play music. Other features include: - Organizer tools: Calculator, EZTip calculator, calendar, alarm clock, stopwatch, world clock, notebook, notepad and drawing pad with handwriting recognition
- Speaker-independent voice commands
- One-touch speakerphone
- Mobile email: Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live Mail, AOL, AIM, Verizon.net
- Messaging: SMS, MMS
- Voice Recording: 1 minute or 1 hour (standby
- Favorites: add up to nine contacts with Picture ID
- Speed Dial: up to 996 entries
- HTML Web browsing with touch navigation and favorites
- Music ringer support (clips from hit songs)
- Hearing Aid Compatibility = M3/T3
- TTY compatible
- Bluetooth version 2.1 with the following profiles: A2DP (stereo music streaming), AVRC (remote control), HFP (hands-free car kits), HSP (communication headsets), BIP (for sending images to another device), BPP (basic printing profile for text, email), DUN (dial-up networking), FTP (file transfer), HID (support for mice or joysticks), OPP (object push for business cards, calendar items, and pictures), PBA (transfer contacts)
Vital Statistics
The LG Dare weighs 3.76 ounces and measures 4.1 x 2.2 x 0.5 inches. Its 1100 mAh lithium-ion battery is rated at up to 280 minutes (4.7 hours) of talk time, and up to 360 hours of standby time. It runs on the 800/1900 CDMA frequencies as well as the 1xEV-DO r0 data network.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 18 more reviews...
Mostly good October 8, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I do actually like this phone, as a software professional of many years experience that's actually quite unusual; I have high expectations. Most of the features on this phone work well and it's a reasonable size too.
The phone works well enough, not the same as a phone with a proper keyboard, or even a phone with a regular keypad. A few things you can do with the real buttons, but the rest has to be done via the touch controls.
Phone connectivity has been better than with AT&T, it has never dropped calls at the places where AT&T dropped them 100% of the time, as an example there was a railway bridge (just north of 84 on Mission Blvd in Fremont, CA) where AT&T drops 100% of calls. Verizon doesn't.
But on the general phone call quality front the Verizon network more often suffers from bad echo, I make phone exchanges and echo cancellation is a network issue, so that's not the phone. But outside of that the voice quality, both sent and received, though adequate is not spectacular. It's good enough, comprehensible, but not great.
In California, hands free is a legal requirement in cars. So Bluetooth was a must-have for me. I don't know if there was a problem when I set the system up, but whereas my Motorola and Nokia phones gave full support to my Garmin Nuvi 670's phone option the Dare does not. It gives little more than remote audio. The one thing that was unforgivable was with my Plantronics 500 headset, I'd call someone and the phone screen would flash up something like "audio transfered to handset" and then the headset would only be used for tones, the call audio would go to the handset. That's illegal in California. Very very bad bug. It may be that there was a problem between the phone and that headset, it doesn't happen with an old headset I keep in the car as a spare, but I'd rather drop the call than get a moving violation.
Controls are a vast improvement from my Motorola phones, the best thing of all is that the side buttons are locked when everything else is locked, so I don't end up with zero ring volume unexpectedly and miss calls.
The display is OK, but not as good as my three year old Dell 51v PDA, not by a very long way. This makes the net browser of questionable use, but zooming in helps with readability, if not the quality. The data network is not fast, nowhere near as fast as AT&T. But then AT&T doesn't have the coverage, so a slow Verizon net is a lot better than no net at all in many of the places I visit. Round Silicon Valley it's rather disappointing though, seems like they should be able to achieve more in the tech capital of the US.
I used BitPim to transfer the comma separated variable (.csv) file I exported from my Nokia E51, which I liked better as a phone, but which lacked GPS and good camera, though it had much faster data and 802.11 too.
The camera is pretty good. It's about the quality of the $800 Olympus I bought about eight years ago, or the cheapest digital you can buy now. The lens isn't as fast and doesn't have great optical zoom, but the sensor is fast, so you can get some surprisingly good low light shots. The shutter delay is long though, and the exposure control with the 'flash' isn't good, so you end up with burned out blue-white images if you use it too close to your subject. Better than nothing though.
Should I review the navigation as if it were a dedicated GPS? The big problem with traffic linked navigation systems is that the method of getting the traffic reports in is poor. The data tends to be old or missing. So you get reports about incidents that were in the distant past, or you get no warning before running in to a problem. The Bay Area has a lot of radar based traffic speed monitoring, but even that isn't enough to cause either this LG phone or my Garmin Nuvi 670 to make good traffic related decisions. The regular routes chosen are fine and the maps downloaded are adequate. But if you are heading out where there's no network coverage then there's no GPS guidance either. The phone does really use GPS, not some awful signal strength based triangulation. Re-routing on bad traffic isn't as good as Tomtom or Garmin, sometimes it even asks you if it should request a new route rather than just getting on with it. Right now I am wondering if I should continue to bother with the GPS or just keep it as a curiosity.
The interface to the phone book is different and much less good than the regular interfaces: navigation is a loaded application, so it doesn't do things the LG way. It should. The phone native software has a favorites list, a contacts list and a dial pad for selecting numbers. The favorites list can use pictures of the recipients. In the messaging the favorites are available as a short list under one tab. In the GPS software there's an option to send a sit-rep to tell people when you will get where you are going, it's under the options menu. But then you have to hit 'add' to add a contact to the recipient list and then either dial the number or find it in the address book. This version of the address book lacks the short cut letter bar, so you can't just go to the 'S' entries with one tap. You have to search for individual names. This is the last thing you want to be doing whilst driving.
The email interface is not good. It is slow and neither includes the graphics nor can follow links. So if your receive html based email you aren't going to know what the message is until you get to a real browser. Or, if you are lucky, you can browse to the page on the Verizon browser, which actually seems OK. The email client also crashes on trying to do a group reply and takes the phone down with it. They need to improve this and also add some user friendliness, like allowing the notification tone to be changed to separate it from other features on the phone.
Then there's the curious operational bugs/incompatibilities/irritations. When it receives an email or text message it just has to tell you right now, even if you are busy writing another text. Couldn't it just beep and flash an icon? Instead you either have to read the other message now, at which point your current message is stuffed into the drafts, or hit the read-later button. Now, if you were typing at the time the message turned up you might randomly get either one of those. When email comes in it beeeeeeps. Nothing you can do about that. And then you have to hit ignore, if you hit the hangup key you also close whatever else you were on. If you get email notification it holds the screen lit, even if the phone had locked the keys and gone blank before, so if you don't tell it not to bother you at night you are very likely to wake to a dead battery. Sometimes the navigation system starts itself for no apparent reason, like when the phone is sitting on the coffee table and we are watching a movie.
The phone comes with a poor set of ring tones, my Nokia E51 was much better and I think the sound quality was better too. In general I think Nokia are much better than LG.
Anyway. so what do you expect when you have a phone that's smaller than an iPod but has a web interface and all else built in? maybe just a bit more than I got. A screen that can be read in direct sun and has better resolution would be a good start.
 I am thrilled with this phone October 5, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I was mostly interested in the highly rated camera which is great. But I just love the touch screen. I also really like that I can change to big fonts and that I can see the clock without my glasses (I am 61!). I also like that I can have everything locked so even the camera doesnt turn on inside my purse and take pictures of nothing.
iPhone killer? Nope. Verizons best phone? Oh yeah! October 1, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Ever since the iPhone came out, touch screen everything has been the new trend. While this technology has existed for many years, having it on something as small as a phone has excited lots of people. Add to that the features of a smart phone, like mp3 players, internet, etc., and you have an all in one product that does the task of multiple electronic devices.
New into the growing market is the LG Dare, a spin-off of the LG Prada that has been available in Europe for a few years now. At first glance, this is a smaller iPhone clone, which is partially true (the Prada came out in 2006). The biggest differences is that...
1) This phone uses proprietary Verizon software. Very similar features to other LG/Verizon phones, which isn't all bad, but you won't be able to customize it like an iPhone.
2) Using the Verizon network, this phone has amazing coverage and high internet speeds. I never have dropped calls, and have coverage in the most remote of places.
The first thing to notice is the beautiful 3-inch screen on the front. It is smaller than the iPhone, but so is the entire phone. The colors are vibrant, and the animations are smooth. The screen is very accurate for one its size, and the overall look is very nice. There are also three buttons on the bottom (call, back/speakerphone, and a back/end call). On the side you get a USB charger, speakerphone button, volume rocker, key lock, and a camera button.
All the menus are layed out well, but require some tinkering before you know where everything is. From the main screen you get a few options. There is messaging, call, main menu, contacts, and favorites. On the upper right there is a link to shortcuts, which can be customized to your most used tasks. One great idea is the ability to drag items from the shortcut screen to your main screen. From there they can be moved anywhere on the front of you Dare.
In addition to the typical features, the Dare also gives you a large amount of connectivity to other things. VZ navigator is a GPS program that provides turn by turn directions to addresses and a huge listing of food, gas, events and more. I found the GPS to be very accurate, and with the text-to-speech function, I never had to look down. Another nice feature included is a mobile email feature that will notify you of new emails from a variety of accounts that you can add.
Texting is very easy as there are many ways to do it. There is your typical text entry by tapping the numbers to get the letters you want. There is T-9 for predictive text, and a handwriting recognition program, which I found to be very poor. The coolest features is that if you turn the Dare sideways, a full qwerty keyboard appears. At first it is a little hard to use because the screen is a little small, but it works well.
Connecting to the internet on the Dare is easy, and the Verizon network is fast at loading web pages. The only real downside is that the small screen makes navigating pages a chore (the volume rocker will change page size), and large pages require a lot of moving around to see everything. This is not like a laptop internet, more like a "last resort" kind of thing that is still neat, but is a bit of a chore.
V-Cast is also included, which has a wealth of video clips that range from pure entertainment, to sports and up to the minute news coverage. With the Verizon network, the speeds are good, and the video quality is watchable. There is Verizon's base browser that has been on many phones offering quick access to news and weather, but because it is proprietary, it is not customizable.
One very nice feature is the camera. It loads in two seconds, and offers a large amount of features for a useful 3.2 megapixel camera. Things like face detection, customizable ISO and white levels, etc., give this camera more bang for your buck than other phones. The video recorder takes nice pictures also, and there is a high rate function that takes 120 frames a second for some very cool slow motion videos.
There is an on-board mp3 player that works quite well, but you must supply your own SD-micro card. Verizon includes Rhapsody software, so you can fill your Dare with tunes for $15 a month, but with the restrictions of DRM (i.e. burning limitations, you can't listen if you don't pay that month).
Other basic features (which I won't hit all of) include your basic, calender, alarm, stopwatch, world time, notepad, etc.. Basically, if it should come with it, this phone does. As a note the battery life is great, lasting days without heavy usage, and about 2-2.5 with very heavy usage.
Some minor quirks do arise. The phone is smaller than the iPhone, so the screen isn't as accurate. The letters on the qwerty keyboard are quite small. Even though there are two forms of feedback (a noise when you hit a letter, and the Dare vibrates when ever any button is touched), you will find that big fingers will hit the wrong button. Also, the web browsing leaves something to be desired.
Overall, this isn't the smart phone the iPhone is, but those on the Verizon network should take a good look at the Dare. It is a sleek and sexy phone that offers a huge amount of connectivity in a fun to use package.
 Don't You DARE! September 24, 2008
1 out of 8 found this review helpful
On the basis of using the DARE cellphone not for two hours, or two days, as is sometimes the case with reviewers, but for almost two months, I would not buy it if I had to do it all over again.
I bought it mainly for the 3.2 megapixel camera. That has been a major disappointment, mainly because it is so difficult to transfer photos to my computer. Verizon and some other companies make it difficult to transfer photos directly to your computer because they want you to use the avenues they have set up for you, such as emailing the photos, for which there is a charge. I have had to buy a Micro SanDisk chip for about $35, but that doesn't end the problems by itself. A Verizon customer with a Blackberry said she has no problem transferring photos directly to her computer.
More importantly, the phone has proved unreliable in other ways. I have trouble accessing voice messages and receiving some calls. Calls sometimes ring only twice and disconnect. I switched to Verizon when I bought the DARE, and that could be the source of the problem, but I doubt it. I switched to Verizon because the people I talk to most are Verizon customers. They don't have problems with their cellphones. There is no Verizon office in the area where I live, not yet anyway, so I get no help there.
Finally, there appears to be a fault in the design. The location of the two buttons that turn the DARE on are located on the lower right of the front and on the upper left side, locations that result in the phone being turned on accidentally very frequently, and draining my battery, especially when it is in my pocket. The DARE might be as great as other reviewers have reported. I am 75 years old, so that might be part of the problem. Think about that when you vote for president on Nov. 3.
Nice phone September 24, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I think this is the best phone that I ever had. It's picture quality is awesome. You can put several songs and can be used as mp3 player. You can edit your pictures and it has self timer too, with the camera. Touch screen is awesome and so bright that it can beat Motorola phones. Battery power is nice too. I will also recommended to buy a screen protector immediately to protect the screen, as well as a case too. The coolest feature is if someone is calling (your friend) it pronounce the name or the number. I remember without seeing my phone I know my mom is calling ("Mama is calling you"). Texting is nice too. It can recognize your handwriting. It has big key board, conventional phone keys and hand writing recognition. I can say it's worth buying.
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