In November, 2007, Verizon launched its iPhone clone in the market by the name of the Voyager. It however, was not introduced with so much publicity and advertisement as compared to the release of Apple’s iPhone in the beginning of 2007. This new iPhone replica is being manufactured by LG Electronics.
The special attribute of Voyager is that it offers touch-screen modes for navigating, even though these are not fundamentally related to the operation of the phone, which is very different feature from that of the iPhone. There are other ways of operating the phone instead of these touch-controls systems. Another added feature of the Voyager as compared to the iPhone is that, as you open the Voyager, you get the glimpse of complete QWERTY keyboard in front of you.
This will make typing on the phone easier while you are travelling. Other features of the Voyager, excepting a touch-screen display, include tangible keys, phone, e-mail and web services, task organizer and a music player. The Voyager has double the thickness of the iPhone and its outer screen, measures 3 inches diagonally, whereas that of the iPhone was 3 1/2-inch screen.
The revolutionary user interface on Apple’s iPhone helped you open an application, type a message, make a call or select any music you want to play with an easy and simple swipe of a finger. The Voyager interface uses touch controls on the exterior side only just to open an application. Whereas on the iPhone, while browsing through photos you could move to the next one with a finger and subsequently by using two fingers you could expand or contract a photo, on the Voyager, you need to tap on a photo to open it but you cannot change image size.
You can navigate forward or backward by tapping an arrow key, but this does not excite the user as much as the iPhone does. It is being opined that the Voyager is simply a more improved edition of enV, just added with a touch-screen. enV is another phone from LG, which made its debut last year and was well accepted among people. It is being debated now that perhaps LG only included a supplementary, new cover to the enV phone, in addition to touch-screen mechanisms and larger screens at the interior (you can view that when you flip open the phone) and exterior parts of the phone.
At present, the market price of enV is $99, while that of the Voyager is $299. It is evident that LG, in order to compete with Apple’s iPhone, transformed its enV to a more sophisticated and advanced version complete with a touch-screen display.
There are a few advantages of this Voyager over the iPhone. In this, personal videos can be shot and music can be played with the help of Bluetooth stereo headphones. These features are not available on the iPhone. The two screens of Voyager at the interior and exterior sides are almost same in dimension and can display mobile video clearly.
One lacuna of the Voyager is that it offers Verizon’s Vcast music service as the software to play music and its quality is awful. But this loophole is greatly compensated for by the option of listening to music with a wireless headphone via the Bluetooth program. Again, since other available typical headphones cannot operate with the Voyager, a Verizon package for their media-enabled music phones needs to be purchased to avail the suitable headphones.
Though the new iPhone clone Voyager looks sleek and trendy with certain additional features for the users over that of the Apple’s iPhone, whether this new product will be as popular and widely accepted across the globe is highly uncertain.
Source:azcentral