The LG Venus is a slick looking cell phone reminiscent of the LG Chocolate, but targeted at the user who doesn’t mind spending a bit more for extra features. The key feature of the Venus that justifies the extra is a small touch sensitive screen on the bottom of the front that replaces traditional navigation controls. The LG Venus is available exclusively from Verizon Wireless for $199 with a two-year contract.
Aside from the Venus’s touch sensitive control screen there’s nothing exceptional about the handset. Styled in dark colors and with a textured soft touch paint that mimics leather on the back, it looks and feels luxurious. Mercifully, as the Venus relies on them so much, the touch sensitive controls work better than the original Chocolate’s, which were unresponsive. The small touch screen also allows for up to four dynamic buttons to appear, providing a great deal of flexibility when interacting with the interface.
Making a call on the LG Venus requires you to slide up the screen to reveal the keypad, but this is not a major impediment and we able to quickly dial a number. However, the organizer features of the LG Venus were not very impressive; even basic tasks (such as adding a contact or scheduling an appointment) were slow. Adding a simple appointment took us nearly 19 seconds. Despite the professional good looks of the handset this is not a smart phone and business users will find it lacks features they need, like customizable task management.
The LG Venus has pretty good sound quality in our tests; both the received and sent audio were mostly within the limits that we test against, although the sent sound (such as you talking into the phone) was slightly heavy on the bass, meaning your voice will sound a bit boomier than it actually is. Side tone, the small amount of your own voice you hear through the handset so you can judge how loudly you are speaking, was good.
Like the Chocolate the LG Venus supports Verizon’s VCast music store and, in conjunction with expandable storage via Micro SD, can be used as a portable music player. Video playback on the Venus was much more limited; the software was awkward to control, and some videos didn’t play back smoothly . The Venus also sports a two megapixel camera that produces photos with reasonable color fidelity but poor resolution and a large amount of noise. It’s fine for casual snaps, but not for anything serious.
Under the hood the LG Venus is a standard LG device with Verizon’s BREW interface, so it will be familiar to those who have used Verizon cell phones before. Despite the business-like looks the Venus does not provide users with smart phone capabilities (like more powerful email features) that you might expect. The web browser on the Venus is typical of cell phones; it is sufficient for browsing mobile versions of web pages, but lacks the more useful features (such as the ability to zoom in on pages) seen on phones such as Apple’s iPhone.
The LG Venus’s performance in our battery tests was mixed. Talk time was sub par at 3 hours 19 minutes, meaning that those who spend several hours a day on their phone will find the Venus quickly runs out of battery. Music playback time was better at almost nine hours, but web browsing time was also limited at just under three and a half hours.
The LG Venus’s strong points are conservative good looks and an innovative touch sensitive screen that replaces traditional controls. Apart from this it is a very average phone. Many will be attracted to the Venus for its looks, but despite spending $200 you won’t get any advanced features from the Venus; the email support is weak and the web browser isn’t anything to write home about. In fact you can purchase the LG Chocolate VX8550 for less than half the cost of the Venus and get a handset that is just as capable and still looks pretty good.
