Now to the LG Decoy, which at 4 inches long, 2 inches wide, and two-thirds of an inch deep, is a little heftier than most other models, with a screen that slides up to reveal the keypad.
In addition to making calls and snapping 2-megapixel photos, it can deliver most of Verizon's extra-cost offerings, including messaging (text, photo and video), Vcast video broadcasts, the company's VZ Navigator GPS mapping service, music downloads, mobile Web applications, e-mail and other goodies.
I'm not a fan of phones with slide-up screens because the keys tend to be smaller than those clamshell or open-face models. The Decoy's keys were no exception. Nor did I particularly care for the joystick-button that handled most on-screen navigation chores. It was too hard to control.
But these are matters of taste, and the slide-up design was probably the best one for the Decoy's distinguishing feature, a notch on the back that contains the 1.5-inch long Bluetooth headset.
The headset detaches easily and fits quite comfortably into my ear.
The headset has a button on the outside for initiating communications with the phone (or answering a call), as well as tiny volume controls that I was constantly hitting by mistake.
The phone had no trouble establishing Bluetooth contact with the headset, and within a minute I was pushing a button on the earpiece and listening to the phone ask me for a command.
Here's where I ran into my first problem.
It was almost impossible to get the phone to understand spoken numbers, particularly when the car was under way and there was noise in the background.
I had better luck once I had entered some contacts and could tell the phone to "Call Home" or "Call Ben." Even so, the phone frequently asked me to repeat myself, or just timed out waiting for a response.
Although I could hear reasonably well through the headphone, folks on the other end said my voice sounded like someone talking into a barrel. When I left voice mail on a couple of different systems and could hear what I sounded like, I had to agree with that assessment.
One issue is Bluetooth technology itself, which is still a work in progress. Using Bluetooth to send one-way data to a printer is relatively easy; using it to rebroadcast a voice that's already been degraded by one broadcast is something else entirely.
