Verizon's Would-Be iPhone Killer: LG Voyager

The Voyager also comes with an assisted global positioning system or A-GPS, which enables navigation. The VZ Navigator program has to be activated for $10 a month or $3 a day.

Fans of Verizon's flip-open enV phone from LG will be pleased with the Voyager. It is essentially an upgrade to that model, only it has a bigger internal screen and an external touch screen. Not to rain on Verizon's publicity parade, but this phone could easily have been called enV-2.

Speaking of the touch screen, though it is small at 2.8 inches compared to the iPhone's 3.5 inch screen, it makes some great strides in the right direction. It gives a tiny buzz to confirm your touch, which is an increasingly popular little feature thrown in to make the touchscreen navigation a little easier.

The biggest disappointment with the Voyager however, is the Web viewing. Verizon has chosen to stick with the paltry Openwave browser that's been lamely rendering Web pages ever since phones could access the Net. It's no secret that mobile phones face big challenges when it comes to delivering anything close to a full Web page on a smaller screen. Even the beloved iPhone has felt the hot blowback from critics who call the miniaturized pages unreadable.

To attack this problem, the Voyager's screen has tools like a zoom button and a few display setting options to try to accommodate the standard blog-sized page on a small screen. Like the iPhone, it even includes a flick function that lets you move around on a page by sweeping your finger across the screen.

But it's pretty much all for naught. Old standby sites like Yahoo Finance and Gawker are too daunting for navigating on the touchscreen. It was far easier to use the keyboard and the inside screen to surf the so-called Net.

At this point, Apple's perch atop the cool phone market will not be threatened by the wayward Voyager.