LG Versa VX9600 (Verizon Wireless)

The LG Versa VX9600 is the touch-screen phone for people who hate touch screens (like me): With a unique detachable QWERTY keyboard, it easily swings between key-tapping and touch-screen-only modes. The Versa is a terrific texting phone, but the software's rough edges prevent it from being an all-around winner.
It's a little difficult to describe the Versa's form factor, because it changes. The handset starts out practically identical to the LG Dare: measuring 4.2 by 2.07 by 0.5 inches (HWD) and weighing 3.8 ounces, with Send, End, and Clear keys below a big 3-inch, 240-by-480-pixel touch-screen display. The screen is actually smaller and of a higher resolution than the Dare's, giving the Versa's UI a smoother, more-sophisticated look. There's a 2-megapixel camera lens and LED flash on the back. On the sides, you'll find camera and volume controls, a 2.5mm headphone jack, a microSD card slot, and a mysterious lock switch.

Slide the switch and the Versa's back panel comes off. You can then pop the backless handset into its hybrid keyboard/case made of leather-textured plastic, which gives the Versa a roomy QWERTY keyboard and a dim, monochrome external screen that displays the time and caller ID information. The keyboard has flat but well-separated and nicely clicky keys, and it's very easy to type on. Unfortunately, the case is misbalanced: When you put the keyboard-equipped Versa down on a table, it tips back rather than sitting up like a little laptop. The included QWERTY keyboard is only the first attachable accessory for the Versa; the second one is an optional gamepad, arriving in April. Verizon remained vague about the gamepad's price and functionality, except to show that it's got an eight-way, Nintendo-style directional pad, and Start and Select buttons. Presumably, games will have to be custom designed to work with the controller.

I really like the Versa's interface. Swiping your finger across the LCD lets you switch between four different home screens: one with photos of your favorite contacts, one with thumbnails of your favorite media stored on the phone, and two with different application shortcuts. The home screens rotate in 3D, like the faces on a cube.

The touch screen is very responsive, and its two touch keyboards—a virtual phone keypad when the screen is in portrait mode and a virtual QWERTY keyboard when it's in landscape mode—are a joy to type on. During my tests, there was an annoying bug in the UI, though: Sometimes when I tapped on icons, they'd beep and flash but not launch.

As a phone, the Versa is acceptable but not great. Reception, volume, and earpiece quality are all good. Transmissions from outdoors, however, had a wobbly, thready sound to them that seemed to be connected to the phone's noise cancellation. There was a lot of in-ear feedback of my own voice, which I didn't mind, but probably some people will find it too much. The phone had no problem auto-pairing with two different Bluetooth headsets—a Motorola H15 and an Altec Lansing Backbeat—and the Nuance-powered voice recognition worked well. Battery life, at about five and a half hours of talk time, wasn't bad.

Besides its excellent interface, the Versa's star feature is its Web browser—it's better than the Dare's. I never thought I'd say this about Teleca's typically subpar Obigo browser, but the new version (Q7.0-1.6) actually renders Web pages the way they look on the desktop, if at very slow speeds. You can scroll around with your finger, drop into full-screen mode, and open up three tabs at once. There's even some Flash support; Flash Lite 3.1.5 plays Flash ads and some games (supporting up to Flash 8), but it can't handle streaming Flash video like what you'll find at Hulu.com.

I've been hoping for years that Verizon would get better e-mail and IM programs; although its Mobile E-mail app is a big step up from the old Wireless Sync, it doesn't hold a candle to Sprint's Seven program. It supports Windows Live, Yahoo, POP and IMAP, and pushes e-mail to you as it arrives, but messages are in plain text with no HTML or attachments. The onboard OZ instant-messaging program is also quite basic, supporting AIM, Windows Live, or Yahoo IM, one at a time. At least the SMS app has been given a facelift and has a cute new interface.

As a media player, the Versa has both software and hardware problems. The audio player syncs music with Rhapsody on PCs and plays a wide range of file formats: unprotected and protected WMA, along with unprotected AAC and MP3. But you're limited to a nonstandard 2.5mm jack for headphones, and we heard both a background hiss and strange popping artifacts over our tunes. As a video player, the Versa plays both MPEG-4 simple profile videos and content streamed from Verizon's V CAST video service. But videos appeared in a 240-by-240 box in the middle of the screen, never in an immersive full-screen or wide-screen mode. I ran into another bug when trying to access V CAST: It took three attempts to connect to the service.

At least you get plenty of room for media: The phone has 272MB free memory, and it supported our 16GB Kingston microSD card.

The Versa's 2MP camera promises a lot, with face detection and a feature called SmartPic, which claims to reduce noise and improve low-light performance. Picture quality was sharp if sometimes overexposed in the bright areas. Low-light photos didn't look too bad, and didn't show too much blur, while daylight photos showed a bit of visible compression artifacting. As far as we could tell, SmartPic didn't help much. The camera's autofocus is terribly slow, causing a 2.1-second shutter delay, which drops to a more reasonable 0.6-second delay if you turn autofocus off. The 640-by-480 movie-recording mode produces footage that, at 14 frames per second (fps), looked a bit jerky and compressed in testing; the 320-by-240 movie mode, at 20 fps, looked better.

The handset works, with the right data plan, as a modem for PCs and Macs. After connecting with a USB cable, I was able to achieve decent speeds of about 800kilobits per second down and 350 Kbps up. That's a little slower than a dedicated USB modem, but not too bad. Verizon's VZNavigator 4.1.4 is also on board for GPS turn-by-turn navigation.

Sure, the LG Versa VX9600 is a do-it-all phone—I just wish it did everything a little better. (Adding a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, less-buggy software, a better video player, and a more-robust e-mail app would be good places to start.) Still, the snap-on hardware keyboard idea is innovative, so if you want to dabble with a touch screen but don't want to be limited to it, this may be the phone for you. Otherwise, heavy texters should check out Verizon's less-expensive and more compact LG EnV2, and touch-screen fans should give the LG Dare a look.