Review: LG Dare
Browse
The Dare has a full HTML browser. With EVDO, it makes for fairly snappy mobile browsing. The first place it takes you to is Verizon's landing page, which has quick and easy access to the typical sports, weather, and business information. The operation of the browser is very similar to the Voyager's. While you can browse in either portrait or landscape mode, I found landscape to be a bit easier to manage most of the time.
Along the bottom of the screen are 8 little icons that let you do different things with the browser, such as go back/forward, zoom in/out, go to your home page, go to your boorkmarks, etc. These are no-brainers to figure out and use. The full menu, which is the right-most button, lets you do some nifty things such as automatically include the current URL in a text message. You can also change the settings so that the display shows the web sites in the most efficient way possible, and you can look at a mini-map feature, which can be helpful when navigating large web sites.
For the most part, web sites load quickly. Google loads in about 4 seconds, while Phone Scoop took almost 10 seconds to load the full HTML version. Sometimes the screen's unresponsiveness gets in the way of the browsing experience. For example, if it fails to register a touch. But in all, it does a good job.
Customize
The Dare lets you change a number of features to make it more your own. It comes pre-loaded with several themes, some wallpapers, and other images. You can adjust the menu fonts (as in LG Serif, LG Script) and dialing font size. This means making the fonts just a tiny bit bigger. Almost every function can be assigned a vibration, bleep, blip or burble of some sort.