LG Venice (Boost Mobile)

If you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, then you shouldn't judge a smartphone?by its specs. Case in point: Based on specs alone, the $219.99 LG Venice?should be able to hold its own against other similarly priced phones in Boost Mobile's lineup. And while that should make this a three and-a-half or four-star phone, a litany of bugs renders it occasionally unusable. That turns what could have been a good smartphone into one we can't recommend.

Design, Call Quality, and Connectivity
The LG Venice measures 4.94 by 2.64 by 0.34 inches (HWD) and weighs just 4.41 ounces, which makes it lightweight and comfortable to hold. The back panel is made of textured gray plastic that looks like metal, while the front is all glass outlined by a plastic silver ring. The 4.3-inch 800-by-480-pixel IPS capacitive touch screen is unremarkable. It gets nice and bright, but lacks crispness. If you look close, you can see a faint vertical pattern that runs through it. There's no ambient light sensor, so you have to set the screen brightness manually. Underneath the display are two touch buttons and a physical Home key. There's a Power button and 3.5mm headphone jack up top, and a volume rocker on the left. The look is minimal, but it works.

Reception was fine, but call quality was average at best in my tests. Calls made with the phone had plenty of static, along with a fuzzy, hissing sound in the background. Transmissions through the microphone sounded better. Calls were fine through a?Jawbone Era?Bluetooth headset, and standard Android voice dialing worked fine. The speakerphone got loud enough to use outside, but it also sounded harsh at top volume.?The 1,700mAh battery was on the short side at 6 hours and 47 minutes of talk time.

Boost Mobile uses Sprint's nationwide network, and the LG Venice connects using EV-DO Rev A. You also get 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, but I experienced major Wi-Fi issues during testing. On two different test phones, I experienced drops in Wi-Fi on two different networks that ranged from sporadic to constant. At first it was so bad I couldn't even download all the apps I needed to run benchmark tests on the phone. Then it seemed to ease up a bit, only to come back again in full force. Aside from the constant pause in whatever you're doing, you can see the Wi-Fi icon in your notifications bar flickering in and out as the phone picks up and drops connection. And for almost everyone, this is a big problem.

Think about it?you probably use Wi-Fi a heck of a lot more often than you use your carrier's network. At work and at home, for instance, I'm always connected to Wi-Fi. And not having a device that can maintain a connection is not just a problem, it's a deal breaker. I didn't experience any drops in connection to Sprint's network with Wi-Fi turned off, but that still posed its own problem, which I'll explain below.

Data Plans and Network
The best reason to get a phone on Boost is to tap into the carrier's inexpensive pricing plans. Android plans start at $55 for unlimited data, talk time, and texts per month. That amount is reduced by $5 every six months you pay your bill on time, until you reach $40. If you don't need as much talk time, you can get a similar plan from Virgin Mobile, but with 300 voice minutes, for just $35 per month. But for either carrier, there is a downside for heavy data users: After 2.5GB of full-speed data usage per month, your speeds will be throttled significantly until the end of your billing cycle.

As we discovered in our?Fastest Mobile Networks?report, Sprint has the slowest 3G speeds of all the carriers we tested. That means that all 3G-only Sprint, Boost, and Virgin phones are running at very slow speeds, and the Venice positively crawled when it wasn't connected to Wi-Fi. This may have to do with the phone's overall bugginess, but downloads and Web browsing were painfully slow.

4G WiMAX support offers a boost, but right now it's only available on the?HTC EVO Design 4G??and the?Samsung Galaxy S II 4G?. Still, if you live in the coverage area, make sure to take that into account when making your decision.

(Next page: Hardware, OS, and Conclusions)

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