In the Box

Let's start with the box contents. The box is a standard looking Verizon box. There is nothing special about it (like the 9800 box). It contained the phone and battery in separate plastic and a charging stand. Also included were the manual and the typical Verizon CD. Once again, no belt clip, no strap (and no connection for one, either), and no headset.

Operation

The operation of this handset is slightly different than your average camera flip phone. First, it has media player controls on the outisde below the external screens. Second, the camera is located along the hinge axis. That is, the camera is aimed out to the left from the edge of the left hinge. The camera trigger button is on the right. This is made usable by the fact that the screen can rotate to aim away from the direction of the camera for taking normal shots or with the direction of the camera for taking self portraits.

The transflash card slot and headset slot are off to the left and the volume and camera control buttons are on the right. The bottom has a non-standard Samsung connector that comes with a hard plastic cover. Since it comes with a charging stand there is no need to remove the cover unless you need to use a data cable.

The user interface is the now-standard Verizon interface. If you're used to the LG VX7000 (or later, such as the 8000, 8100, 9800, 5200, etc.) then you'll be used to this interface. The features aren't identical, of course.

Basic Features

The phone, as mentioned above, features a 2.0MP camera with optical zoom and auto-focus. An MP3 player and Video player are available for playing media off of the TransFlash card or downloaded VCast videos. You can only play MP3s on the outside, not video.

Video wallpaper can be used, but only on the internal screen. If the video wallpaper came from the TransFlash card and the card is removed the wallpaper is reverted to the VCast wallpaper and is not returned when the card is re-inserted (unlike the 9800). Also unlike the 9800, the video wallpaper loops continually until the backlight turns off. So, if you have the backlight set to always on it will continue to loop indefinitely. When on the charging stand, this isn't so bad. But if left open on a desk it could drain the battery rather rapidly.

Besides the standard phone features of a calendar, alarm clock, notepad, and calculator the 970 also features a "File Viewer" for viewing Word docs, PDF files, PNG and JPEG images, Text files, PowerPoint files, and some other formats. I'll talk more about those later.

Bluetooth is present for headset and hands-free use. No other profiles are supported or exposed.

It has stereo speakers, but they are on the bottom of the external piece right below the media controls. Although they are at the edges they are still facing forward so there is very little stereo separation. The 970 takes standard stereo phone headsets, though, that work with the 4-pin 2.5mm jack.

The phone features 60MB of built-in storage and 6MB of RAM. The storage is used for Flix, Pix, and Downloads. Naturally, the phone supports the full range of Get It Now (QUALCOMM's BREW) downloads including 3D VCast games. The software version of this review is a970.YF24.

The Screens

The external screen on this phone has silver shading over it. When the display is off it just looks like a mirror. When indoors and the display is turned on the mirror part is nearly invisible. Text messages and MP3 playback can be done from the external screen. The track forward and track backword buttons are used for scrolling and the play/pause button is used for select when not in the media player. The phone usually gives visual hints on which key does what. The external screen is basically useless outdoors. The brighter the light is the more likely the reflected light will be brighter than the backlight. In direct sunlight it is completely impossible to read the screen -- and the sun can reflect right back out you making for a very uncomfortable situation.

The internal screen doesn't suffer from the problems of being a mirror but it still can hardly been seen in the sunlight. A little bit of shade, though, and it becomes visible but dark. You can read the time or see the number you're dialing but you wouldn't want to play games or watch a video. The resolution is the standard 176x220 pixels that are being used on most mid- to high-range handsets these days.

Overall, the displays are the most disappointing part of the phone, in my opinion.

Charging Stand

The charging stand allows for the charging of the phone plus one addition battery. It's weighted nicely to hold the phone in place. When the handset is flipped open, the screen is angled nicely for viewing. This plays well with watching videos or seeing the video wallpaper. Dropping the phone into the stand takes very little pressure but then the whole stand can be picked up by lifting up on the phone (that is, it's held in tightly). You have to leverage it out with a forward or sideways twist. This is well designed.

Camera

The camera is primarily made to be used with the screen rotated either in the direction of the camera or away from it. In fact, the camera application automatically turns on when you do this. Once the camera is started you get a responsive preview screen with a bunch of information on it. It will tell you if you're in photo or video mode, what resolution, what type of flash mode, how many pictures can be taken with the space left, what zoom level you're on, and some icon hints and what buttons do what. Pressing the "3 dot" button will bring up a menu where all of the camera settings can be changed or it can be switched into video mode.

You can set a time for 2, 5, or 10 seconds. Two seconds is useful for removing shutter button jitter. A multi-shot mode allows for a series of individual pictures to be taken or a bunch that are stored in a single image (split picture mode). The "color" modes can do things like Sepia, sketch, emboss, warm, cool and some other effects. Most would be better suited in Photoshop, but if you're just going to send the image some of the effects are fun and look cool. All are shown in real-time. Metering (average, center, spot), brightness, and contrast can all be set, too. In addition, you can turn the shutter sound on and off (also changes the zoom sound), remove the icons from the preview screen, change where the images get stored to (card or phone), and changes the auto-focus setting.

Strangely, the auto-focus is off by default. However, after turning it on I was able to see why. It requires pressing and holding the shutter to focus -- then when green you press a little harder and it'll take the shot. It's a bit strange and there is almost no button feedback. It will focus a little bit with this setting off, but not much. It's a bit strange.

The picture mode can be adjusted, too, which includes settings like auto, portrait, scenic, sports, macro, and some others. Macro mode does seem to allow it to focus up closer, but perhaps only in auto-focus mode? It's not as striking of a difference as on the LG VX8000 or VX9800.

The zoom is fixed at 1x and 2x, but it is optical, at least. However, there is no digital zoom. This doesn't bother me because digital zoom is useless, for the most part. A scale in Photoshop can do much more, usually.

In video mode, the options are all a bit different. The record mode allows for MMS sized images, or normal (which is limited by memory only), or "rec at interv" which basically allows you to pause while recording and restart. It's also only limited by memory. This is a nice mode for doing a bunch of clips at once that can then be edited. It saves having to remove fast pans and other things.

Zoom doesn't work while recording. The flash works the same, but remains on for the capture duration when needed. It also has a self time and the quality can be controled. The quality defaults to "Fine" which is nice. Brightness, white balance, and color effect are all the same. Under settings you can still remove the icons and change the storage location. However, you can also change the frame rate between "indoor" and "outdoor." Confused? Yeah, I don't know what the means and the manual doesn't say either. I'll have to record both and find out what it was. ;)

Sample Photos

Here are a few outside pictures. None of them are particularly good. I don't think they're as good as the ones from the 9800, but they are bigger, of course.

These two images are closer up. However, neither of them are very good. They both show poor focus as well as strange colorings and noise.

More images taken with the phone can be seen here.

Videos coming soon!

Bluetooth

The Bluetooth support on this handset is very sparse. It only supports headset and hands-free profiles. I don't have either of these, so I can't comment on the performance here. The headset support is only mono, too. You won't get to enjoy stereo MP3s via Bluetooth.

The power can be turned on and off as well as visibility. Unlike most other phones, visibility is either on or off -- there is no time-out feature. The phone can search for any Bluetooth device or just audible devices. This is handy to find other Bluetooth devices around. You can then pair with anything, but it will tell you on everything but an audible device that it doesn't have any supported profiles. It's fun if only to poke at other people's computers or PDAs.

And just to make it clear, there is no BT DUN support or serial support.

This is disappointing, but not nearly as much as the screens primarily because we have all been expecting Verizon to not have any support for anything but headsets.

MP3 Player

The MP3 player is a fairly basic affair. It can be launched from the outside by pressing and holding the play/pause button or on the inside by going to the Tools menu under Tools & Settings (you won't find it under Tunes & Tones like all of the other phones). If there is no card inserted, it won't start. If the volume is set all the way down, it won't start but rather will say to "change master volume." And finally, if there are no MP3s in the correct directory on the card, it won't start either. The easiest way to see the correct directories is to stick an empty card in and have the phone "format" it. (The directories it creates are "MY_FILES", "MY_FLIX", "MY_MUSIC", and "MY_PIX".)

When playing on the outside, you start with a list of files and you choose one to play. After that, they play in alphabetical order. You can flip it open to keep playing on the inside. Once there, the UI is just like the VCast video player. Once here, you have the option to repeat one song or all. There is no shuffle option.

When starting play from the inside, no song is selected by default. You have to go in to options and choose "Select All" to have the same behavior as the outside screen. Or you can just choose a few with the OK key to play. From the list you can also view the song info, erase a single file, or erase all files. There is no erase selected option. The song info actually reads ID3 tags and shows the Title, Artist, Album, Genre, Copyright, Duration (Time), Size, and Bitrate.

There are no playback effects to choose from, unlike the 9800. It just plays them. Playback is stereo through a stereo headset, as it is through the speakers. As noted before, though, the speaker output is so close and in the same direction that hearing any separate requires you to almost literally stick your nose between the two speakers. ;)

Speech-to-Text

The 970 features an input method called VoiceMode. This appears to only be available when composing messages. It can't be used for all fields in messaging or even the notepad. It also can't be used in any of the downloadable applications (such as Mobile IM). This on it's own reduces the usefulnessof this feature.

The first time you start VoiceMode you have to train the phone for your own voice. It says it will take about 3 minutes but what it really means is that it's going to ask you to read off 122 words (and not all are different, for some reason). This is rather tiring, but doesn't actually take very long. It recommends that you be in a quiet place to do this.

Once trained, though, this feature actually works remarkably well. Sometimes it gets a word wrong while you're dictating but it will actually go back and do some corrections when you're done. Eh, so how does it know when you're done? Well, you have to hold down the "voice button" which is actually the button with the three dots on it on the right of the phone. This is moderately annoying, but does make it easy to pause or stop if someone walks up.

Like older voice recognition software, you have to pause between each word. I found the most difficult for it to do was numbers. Sometimes it would get them on it's second pass recognition but more often than not it would still get one or two wrong. Much easier to just type numbers in, given it's a numeric keypad. ;) If it doesn't know a word and you spell the word out for it will add that word to it's dictionary, which is great.

File Viewer

One of the unique features of the a970 is the file viewer. It's found under the Tools menu in Tools & Settings. When launching, it can view files on the phone or on the memory card. When choosing the phone this appears to just be for the JPEGs found on the phone. The JPEG decoding this way is very slow, but it does provide a way to zoom in on your pictures -- the only way on this phone.

But what else can it do? Well, the real fun comes when you choose card. It then allows you to choose between your pix and "others" where others are files found in the "my_files" directory. According to the documentation, it supports the following files: PNG, ELX, PPT, DOC, JPG, PDF, and TXT. This sounds absolutely wonderful, doesn't it? PowerPoint and Acrobat PDF file reading support?

Yeah, that's what I thought. That is, until I started trying to use it. I should start by saying that it does work. I've tried everything but an ELX file (primarily because I have no idea what the format is and I'm too lazy to google it). My first observation was that everything, even TXT file viewing, was incredibly slow.

For instance, I created a text file that simply said, "This is a test of how long it takes to decode this file." It took about 6 seconds to load that file and even then, the text was just a line on the screen -- you have to zoom in to read it. When zoomed to the "just barely readable" setting, only about 75% of the sentence shows on the screen -- as a single line. It's as if it was printed on a page. In fact, it looks like that's exactly what the software is doing: rendering any file onto virtual pages that can then be zoomed in on. Text could have been handled much better than this. At maximum zoom, only the part of the word takes, "ake". could fit on the screen -- this is very readable but with no wrapping it's hard to use. The text is nicely anti-aliased and looks like printed or typed text.

Acrobat PDF file support is pretty weak. Only about 20% of the files I tried worked. For PowerPoint files, most worked and the ones with large text were fairly readable with only minimal zooming required. Microsoft Word files also worked pretty well. Moving between pages is fairly easy -- each page has to be decoded (or rendered) separately.

Overall, this is an interesting feature. It could have been great if it was faster and drew text without rendering it on a virtual 8.5"x11" page. But if you really need to read a document in a pinch, this could be just the tool you need. For me, I would just as soon put text up on my own web page and use the browser. It won't be much slower but it will be more easily read. Of course, if you're getting a file from someone else and just want to preview it on your way back to the office this may work fine.

Battery Life

As usual, this part is fairly weak from me. The battery life actually seems better than most, especially when in a non-1xEVDO coverage area. It does have some features (like video wallpaper) that will definitely eat into the battery life.

The battery gets hot after 40-50 minutes of MP3 playing in the car. That's probably a sign that it won't last very long. Although, it didn't actually reduce the number of battery bars beyond the first (there are 4 -- it still had 3 after the MP3 playing).

I'm thinking I'll let it sit open and with the video wallpaper playing for a while and see what happens. That would probably be a fairly intensive use of it as the video would be playing as well as the backlight being on the whole time.

And now I have. After about 3 hours of the backlight and video wallpaper being on the phone's battery indicator started flashing. Unfortunately, this was actually right when I wanted to use it to shoot some video. As it turns out, when it's in "low-battery mode" at least three things happen. The first is that video wallpapers don't play; instead, you see the basic VCast wallpaper. Second is that you can't even launch the camera application. It just gives a "Battery Low" warning. Finally, you can't launch the MP3 player for the same reason. You can still launch the file viewer, browser, application downloads, and other things though.

Here is another tale about the battery life. This is all normal usage in a day of me. I did have BT turned on the whole time; I'll found out today how much that affects the battery life. I started with a full charged battery; the light was green on the charger when I pulled it off before I headed out to work. I listened to MP3s in the morning for about 70 minutes. I talked on the phone for about 20 minutes. I watched about 8-10 VCast videos. Later on I listened to another 30 minutes of MP3s. It should have been 40 minutes, but the phone turned off the MP3 player because the battery was almost dead. Before I got home, the phone completely died.

Web Browsing

There isn't much to say about the web browsing. It has Openwave Browser v6.2.3.2 on it. This gives it XHTML-MP support, or what Verizon calls it: Mobile Web 2.0. It's really no different than on any standard phone with MW2. It can browse to pretty much any site but entering URLs is a typing challenge. Luckily you can save them to your favorites and even edit those online. It runs at 1xEVDO speeds, so it's nice and responsive (with coverage, of course). Even at 1xRTT speeds, it's not too bad although latency is a bit worse. It has the same security certificates as all of the phones I've seen, so privately signed sites probably won't work as usual.

If you've never used Verizon's Mobile Web 2.0 then what you'll experience is a much graphically richer browsing experience on the phone. Verizon's standard web area is well laid out with lots of news and information fairly rapidly available and most of it under numeric key clicks, too, which speeds up the browsing. The main menu pages are all designed nicely for the screen size. Once on 1xEVDO you'll forget you're on a wireless connection -- it's that fast.

Little Nice Things

The fact that you can flip open the screen, rotate it, and it automatically goes into camera mode is quite nice.

It supports memory-limited length videos recorded to the memory card. This is a nice feature missing from many phones. Strangely, the two phones that I know that support this are the 970 and the Motorola V710 -- both of which take TransFlash cards. ;)

Little Naughty Things

Because of the way the display rotates, it's nearly impossible to flip it open with your thumb. This just causes the display to rotate rather than open. It is possible, but it involves sliding your thumb inside a bit and pushing up along the screen.

The fact that the screens are nearly useless outside and, in particular, in the sun is unfortunate. A little shade helps for taking pictures outside, though.

I absolutely can't get the TransFlash clicked in or out with my fingers. (My fingernails are short.) The recess is just a bit too deep for my use. I have to use something else, most frequently the SD card adapter. This is a nuisance, especially when I'm clicking it in and out all day for a review. ;)

Tips & Tricks

I don't have any yet. Feel free to send any in; I'll give full credit. ;)

Well, that's it. For as long as I have the phone I'll field any questions I can answer about it. I'm sure there is stuff I missed (hopefully less than my first pass on the 9800... heh).