The LG Dare is the first candy bar–style touchscreen phone to hit Verizon Wireless’ shelves, and while it looks strikingly similar to AT&T’s LG Vu, Verizon’s version forgoes live mobile TV for a higher resolution 3.2-megapixel camera, handwriting recognition, GPS, and a revamped user interface. At $199 (with $50 mail-in rebate and two-year contract), the LG Dare is inferior to the iPhone, but it’s a far more compelling alternative to the LG Voyager and Samsung Glyde for multimedia-savvy VZW subscribers.

LG Dare Design

The LG Dare is almost exactly the same size as the LG Vu. It measures in at 4.1 x 2.2 x 0.5 inches, making it 0.2 inches shorter than the Vu. Even though it’s slimmer, the Dare packs on 0.6 ounces more than the Vu. Still, at 3.8 ounces the Dare feels relatively light.

The Dare’s 3-inch haptic touchscreen display is the same size as the one found on the LG Vu, and it has the same 400 x 240-pixel resolution. It sports silver accents along the bottom and around its border, and three large silver buttons frame the bottom of the display: one for placing calls, one for ending calls that doubles as the power button, and one for backtracking through menus that doubles as a voice-recorder button.

The right side of the Dare has a camera quick-launch button and volume controls, and the left side has a microSD slot, a speakerphone button, and a hardware lock key. We appreciate that LG included a 3.5mm headphone jack on the top of the phone, an infinite improvement over the LG Vu’s proprietary headphone jack.

Movable Touchscreen User Interface

We enjoyed watching the animated backgrounds on the Dare’s UI, but like the Samsung Glyde, the fun wears off quickly and we ended up switching to a static image. Along the bottom of the display are five icons similar to the icon sets on the LG Voyager and Vu: Messages, Calls, Main Menu (represented by four dots), Phone book, and Favorites. The Favorites tab is fun to use: We created thumbnail pictures of our contacts, and when we wanted to call them, simply dragged the image over to the phone icon. You can do the same for messaging or for viewing contact information as well.

While the LG Dare’s UI is fluid and fun to use overall, it’s much more confusing than the simplistic UI found on the LG Vu, due to two menus that are very similar to each other: the Main Menu and another menu that pops out from a triangular tab on the right-hand side of the screen. Both have similar icons for GPS, the browser, and messaging, but the Main Menu has some apps missing from the second menu, and vice versa. This setup continually had us fumbling between the two menus looking for the right program. There is one way to avoid some of this confusion: drag items from the second tabbed menu out on to the desktop. When you’re done using the applications, or are tired of a cluttered desktop, you can simply drag them away again. We also liked being able to move the icons around inside the menus. 

We found that the Dare wasn’t as good as the LG Vu at recognizing our screen touches; sometimes it wouldn’t react at all. Against the competition, the Dare is better than the Samsung Glyde but inferior to the Samsung Instinct and the LG Vu. The phone also has a hardware accelerometer which lets you view Web pages or the music player in landscape or portrait mode. The Vu switches modes depending on what application is open but doesn’t have an accelerometer.