Verizon Env2, LG VX9100 forum
What are your opinions of the new Env2?
Tech Update
A tech blog with up-to-date news and software guides.
Hits
Recent Posts
- Bitpim updated again to 1.0.6.20080724
- Env2 and Bitpim 1.0.6.20080707 Calendar Management Update
- iTunes 7.7 Released and App Store view and download only
- Rumored: iTunes 7.7
- Bitpim Test 1.0.6
- Sync Music to your EnV2
- Why iTunes will never be a subscription based music service
- How to set up an ad-hoc network using wifi for easy file sharing
- Contact Sync between your Mac and your EnV2
- How to sync your LG VX9100, or EnV2 with a Mac
Blogvis.com - Powered by WordPress MU & designed by Julien De Luca. Packaged by Edublogs - education blogs.
Has anyone figured out how to use this phone with bitpim yet?
no according to http://www.howardforums.com/printthread.php?t=1364322&page=1&pp=30 this phone has some sort of encryption on it making it harder for us to use it with bitpim. Bitpim experts are hopefully working on this problem though.
Has anyone had problems with the keyguard on the front of the screen. mine keeps pressing random numbers and keys, but it has yet to dial someones number.
does it cost to use the Backup Assistant that verizon provides? I read here that it didnt but i just wanted to make sure…
Posted here is the verizon wireless website with information about the backup assistant. It says that it is free as long as you have a my account and you register for it which is also free. Hope i answered all of your questions! Keep the comments coming!
http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/landingpages/backup.jsp
thank you. so as long as i create a my account, then i shouldnt be charged…..right?
correct.
ok thanks
no problem
its been posted on other forums that you can get $30 off of you phone because of the red hot deal days on verizon.com. Just dial *611 and talk to customer service to see if you can get your money back or a credit.
Has anyone else verified the status of the $30 refund for the Red Hot Deal Days?
Its posted here so i guess the $30 back because of red hot deal days offer does still apply even if you bought your phone a week ago.
http://www.howardforums.com/printthread.php?t=1364322&page=27&pp=30
I have had the enV2 for about a week and a half and had to return it once due to a software problem with the built in video editor failing all the time…. I LOVE the phone BUT… Yes, I have had a problem with the so-called locked keyboard actually unlocking while in my pocket, and twice so far it called someone- once while I had my bluetooth in so I was able to jump on the END button in time, and the other time it was in my pocket INSIDE a case, and it STILL unlocked and called someone while I was not paying attention- only to find someone saying HELLO?! HELLO?! When I FINALLY fogured out where the mystery voice came from, they had hung up- BUT who knows how long that call was going on for, and what did they hear??!? I HAVE to return the phone on that basis alone- that in 2 days, there were 2 unscheduled phone calls made from a locked keyboard inside a hard shell case… I can’t babysit the keyboard alll day long and don’t want to find out the hard way that people are getting called by me and hearing stuff they might not want to or should not hear… OTHER THAN THAT… it’s a great phone! LOL! OH WELL!
oh, thats too bad. Just curious, what did you have the keyguard setting set to? Also, what type of case did you have with it?
my env2 doesnt allow me to talk when its closed. only when it’s open on speaker. What gives?
Im not sure. you might want to talk to a verizon representative or take it back to the customer service.
does anyone have the problem where the paint on the numbers in the front is completely peeling off? i got the phone like 2 weeks ago and there was a little something on the number 4, i scratched it off and realized it was the actual paint peeling off! and what’s worse is that i’m tempted to just keep on picking it off. i’m bringing it to a verizon store soon but i just wanted to see if you people had some of the same problems. oh, and btw, once you scratch a little bit off, it’s so easy to keep on scratching it off… like a lottery ticket thingy.
thats weird. ive never seen a phone do that. You should definitely take it back to the store and get it replaced.
[…] Verizon LG VX9100, Env2 Forum […]
whenever i try to watch video on the net, it says that adobi is shut off, or i have a old version of flash player? is there a fix for this?
i believe this is the exact message… Hello, you either have JavaScript turned off or an old version of Adobe’s Flash Player. …
currently the phone’s internet browser mobile web 2.0 does not support flash. I think the only way to use flash on the phone is to use the V Cast video subscription which costs money.
Here’s my thing with it…Many of the settings do not function. For example. I dokn’t want to hear the “buttons” being clicked while I am texting and on the phone. “key volume” doesn’t mute when on mute. Keyguard only works when the phone is NOT being used. Some of the display settings don’t work the way they should, if I edit a photo, then save it, the saved photo does not show in the list or update or even ask me to save it as a different name if a file aready exists.
I think it is a great phone, but there are some bugs that need to be worked out in the interface still. Another weird issue, I can load VZnavigator while on the phone (didn’t used to be able to), but my caller is muted, as if they are put on pause. They can hear me, but I can’t hear them. then when I exit out of VZnavigator, the call comes back to normal.
The keyguard is the most annoying. WHYYYYYY is it so hard for manufacturers to figure out I DON”T WANT MY KEYS TO WORK WHILE I AM ON THE PHONE UNLESS I TELL THEM TO! This is a particularly large problem with phones that have buttons on the front of them such as this one.
wow! that is one of the most severe cases I have seen or heard of about this phone. Just curious did you return the phone and get a new one, or did you stick it out with all of the problems?
When I go to software update it says my phone is an unregistered device. however I am registed on My Account. why can’t i update the software?
Anyone else having issues with Bluetooth? I tried 3 different ones and with my phone in my pocket, it was horribly staticy. I couldnt even hear the person on the call.
I have not heard of any of the problems stated above. Has anyone else had similar problems and found a solution?
just got the phone last night so im trying to get the hang of it today and have ran across a couple things that i cannot figure out.
first off, pictures that i have taken with my old phone and have transfered to the env2 show up smaller when viewing them then the photos that i take with the phone itself. is there anyway to change that? its a little annoying not being able to see the pic as well as i used to… but photos that i had stored on my old phone that were sent to me from someone elses phone via a pic message are as big as pics taken with the env2… any ideas why and how to change that?
and secondly, music that i have downloaded on itunes wont play on my phone (looks like their format is mpeg 4, not mp3???). i have mp3s from my computer that i ripped from cds using itunes that play fine, but stuff ive actually purchased doesnt? how can i get purchased songs to play on the phone too?
any help is greatly appreciated!
about the pictures thing…I haven’t been able to figure that out either. The only half solution I can think of is to use the zoom feature on each and every picture which is quite annoying. If you buy music from iTunes, in the protected format, it comes in .m4p which is the .m4a encoding with DRM protection. To get around this, simply compile a playlist in iTunes with all of the songs that you want on your phone. Then under preferences > advanced > burning make sure that the copy cd text option is checked. Then burn your cd. Re-rip the contents back to your iTunes library in either the mp3 or the aac encoder. Then copy them to your memory card and play them on your phone in the my_music directory. Hope that helps!
thanks! ill try the ripping a cd thing, didnt think about doing it that way…
and ill keep looking for a solution to the picture prob because im sure there has to be a way to fix it. if i find one ill post about it here.
another question…
what about games ive purchased on my old phone? is there a way to transfer those to the new one? or redownload them without having to pay again? cause that kinda sucks if i have to pay $7.99 per game again… =/
oh, and with the pictures. i dont know if you knew this and i just didnt understand, but after you zoom in to a photo you can save it, zoomed in. ive done it with a couple of the small pictures and now when i go back to view them, theyre fullsize now. it saves it as a copy though, so you have to go back and delete the small ones otherwise you have two copies of all those pics… also, it saves them to the phone, not the card, so if you dont want them taking up space in the phones memory, youd have to move them over to the card…
once again, thanks for the help =)
You’re welcome, glad I could help. About the pictures thing…that is what I was trying to explain sorry you didn’t understand at first. Glad you figured it out though. The games…well, I’ll look into that but I’m pretty sure you’d have to re-buy them. Sorry.
I bought an 8 gig card and put 700 songs on it. I am wondering if there is a limit to the number of artists because about 200 of my songs are listed under “unknown artist” even though they are tagged correctly and named Artist - Title.mp3 I just spent 2 hours pouring through tags and filenames trying to find a common element that would cause the artists to list as unknown…it is a pain if I leave the songs this way because when you SEARCH with the music player and it shows the song you want, when you click on OK instead of playing the song it takes you to the artist screen then you scroll to the song…most artists don’t have that many songs to scroll through so not a problem…but with UNKNOWN ARTIST having 200 songs in it, SEARCH takes me there and then I have to scroll through the 200 songs to find my song…poor search tool and I think there is a limit on the number of artists you can have on the player, it doesn’t tell me how many artists I have on there, so it is hard for me to say what that limit is.
Also, before loading your songs onto the card, make sure there are no parenthesis in the filename ( ) many song names will have them for a note or extra words of the song. What I did was do a windows file search for files with a ( in them and came up with about 50 files and then deleted the paranthesis in the name, then did a search for ( and did the same…a parenthesis causes the name to show up weird…for example AC DC - Dirty Deeds (done.mp3 would show as (done.mp3 as the artist name in the player!
Some bugs to be worked out of the player. Please fix this thing Verizon, it is frustrating to use!
One nice feature is the Fn button when the ENV2 is open - it gives you an additional shortcut menu that is easy to alter…I put my media center apps here and now don’t have a bunch of directories to go through to get to my apps. The Fn button is on the top left side, if you push it the shortcut menu comes right up.
You can also program the direction keys to be shortcuts in the settings menu.
When using the Web browser, be sure to save your favorite sites to Favorites, once you do that when you open the Mobile Web browser, press the right soft key that says menu, top choice is VZW Home so you just hit OK, then press 9 and your favorites will come right up. The favorites are numbered, so if you remember an often used favorite’s number, like my weather site is on favorite link#4 so I press Mobile Web - right softkey-OK-9-4 I haven’t found any shortcut keys that can be set right for a specific website - although as I stated above you can set them to go directly to specified Media Center Apps,
I took my phone to Best Buy and Circuit City and tried to use it with a Bluetooth Car Radio as I hoped to install one in my car and use my phone to play music to it…alas ENV2 is not Bluetooth 2.0 so it didn’t work with most of them, although I got it to work with that Parrot bluetooth music attachment that can play through the radio…I didn’t like Parrot for voice calls though.
Has anyone had luck in finding a car radio that allows the ENV2 music player to access it via the bluetooth? If not I am just going to get one with one of those plugs in the front, although I was hoping to use the radio feature for handsfree calls.
Backup Assistant is free if you sign up for a free Verizon online account…also ESPN MVP is also free through media player - a very nice app!
Chaperone parent appears to be free - no subscription listed but you have to pay $9.99 a month for each kid you track and the kids can easily delete the app off the phone so it is good for safety monitoring but not for snooping because the kids get wise and delete the app off the phone if they don’t want to be found.
VZ navigator is great, except some badly needed info is in too small print - Estimated travel time left to destination is in like a size 9 font…tiny…not readable on the fly. Plus it goes away after the first direction moves on to the second turn screen - future direction screens don’t show minutes left to destination nor do you get an Estimated time of arrival…a basic gps function.
We had storms here, Navigator failed to show that a major road had all its lights out and a tree across one section of it (and had been that way for two days) I got stuck in 45 minutes travel over a one mile stretch.
The Media Center is very limited in its offerings - only 14 apps as of today…there were 104 apps available for other phones…there are absolutely no business tools. If you liked using the BiM Active to Record running/cycling/walking using GPS from your phone with maps, speed, and distance - FORGET IT! Not available for the ENV2. What is available, here is a list:
ESPN MVP, Location Management (not an app), Wireless Sync Email, Mobile IM, VZ Navigator, Accuweather.com Premium (can get same info from mobile web and save 3.99 per month charge), Backup Assistant, Chaperone Parent, Chaperone Child, Mobile Email, Drinktini 2.0, Superpages 2.0 (not needed if you use VZ Navigator as it has same features), Miles to Go mileage tracker for car, VE Mail
Note that there are like 3 different email programs out of the 14, and Location Management is only an app where you agree to be found by GPS and not an entertainment app, and you don’t have kids so dont need chaperone, that leaves you 8 Apps, 3 of which are possibly useful…there are no other apps for media center folks (Media Center is the Get It Now replacement that ENV2 uses instead of Get It Now).
There are, however, many games available under media center - games. And they are very good, I like scrabble, VZW Suduko, VZW solitaire, Who wants to be a millionaire and Scene It are great games as I have whipped out the phone in a crowd and asked the trivia questions and it was very entertaining.
To be fair there are 145 games available, although I haven’t found any that are free, they can be bought by subscription but usually for a few dollars more you can outright buy the app and there is no monthly subscription (usually around 10 bucks to buy a game).
I was looking more for the GPS walking/biking miles traveled feature, I was spoiled by my Palm pilot apps, of which there were so many… am thinking next time I renew my contract I am going that way - with a windows type pda phone for better calendars and contacts.
If you put photos from your computer onto your phone’s card, and pull it up in full view on the inside screen it will appear as a tiny thumbnail - very disappointing…but there is a trick to get it to go full screen - open the picture, click the right softkey “options” button - #5 is Rotate/Zoom/Crop - click that - then click on zoom - the left and right softkeys are zoom in and zoom out, zoom in once and then click OK for “done” and then click the left soft key labeled SAVE. go back and look at your picture in full view and it will be full screen!
Hope all this helps, i had to find out the hard way!
Great comments everyone! Keep it up!
I also have had problems with the phone becoming unlocked and calling while in my pocket. I know…..don’t put it in your pocket. But I want to and I don’t like that it unlocks. Secondly, I’m trying to load an MP3 file into the phone and am unable to. Talking to a verizon person, I was informed that the LG enV2 software will not allow you to load MP3 into your phone through the mobile web2, nor allow anything through (mp3) due to pirate software residing in the phone. The verizon person alluded that I could get around it through a PC or MAC but I am not having any luck.
I have a Mac and musicmanager will not work on a MAC. Anyone know the software I should be using?
@jdakota: are you using a memory card to insert music onto your phone? otherwise you can use bluetooth…I can write a short tutorial using bluetooth on a Mac to put music onto your Env2 if you would like.
I’m going to get an env2 today and will expect to link to a Mac with OS X for contacts,pics, tunes, and calendar. Could you publish the tutorial? THX.
@Mathpar: Half of my tutorial is posted here http://techupdate.blogvis.com/2008/06/18/how-to-sync-your-lg-vx9100-or-env2-with-a-mac/
You can get started with syncing pictures, sounds, and videos. Music, calendar, and contacts is coming soon.
Terrific, Thx
Contacts sync is posted in this article http://techupdate.blogvis.com/2008/06/19/contact-sync-between-your-mac-and-your-env2/ Enjoy!
Currently on my 2nd Env2 as I’ve had so many problems with the phone. I must say I do love it though and wish they could resolve the issues. 1st of course the timer on the outside always resets back to 7secs after I’ve changed it. Then I had issues where I could not send picture msgs to anyone, use media center, or verizon navigator. Once that was all fixed I ended up with ringback tones when I’ve never been subscribed to them ever. Even the Verizon people couldn’t not figure out how I ended up with them as it was not even added to my features but was on there. Next issue comes with the fact that some of the display functions do not work (on either of the Env2’s I’ve had). One to mention is the Charging Screen option never worked, the backlight always times out on different settings, and I can’t seem to ever get my pictures from my old phone resized. I did find an option to fix the pictures reading your forum. As for my final and most annoying problem its calls fading out. I will be talking to someone and I lose like 5-6 of their words. They will be steady talking and my phone goes blank this is with full EV lines and full 1X lines. The call never actually drops but I cannot hear what they are saying and asking them to repeat themselves gets frustrating. This has been with both of my Env2’s and although it sounds some are network issues others phone issues it’s hard to say as I’ve never had any of these problems in my 12 years with Verizon Wireless. Granted there were more dead zones back then but never this many glitches. Sorry to rant…. =)
Most of those problems have been reoccurring on many of the Env2s released by Verizon. It is just a faulty phone full of glitches but I still love its great style and design. Just a note about the charging screen, it has to be plugged into the charger and on for it to work. Then you just open it and let it sit for about a 30 sec to a min with the screen open. The backlight should turn off in that time frame then it should appear with whichever charging screen you chose. Hope that helps! Great comments.
Ahh the charging screen never worked for me. Happy to say I retired my Env2 for the LG Dare. So far no glitches I’ve found and the sound is crystal clear (yay no more having to repeat what is said on calls by both parties). I’m finally content I just wish the lovely little Env2 would have would have been less glitchy I so loved the design. RIP my little Env2 buddy. =(
I’ve had the Env2 for about a week now. Love the form factor and the keyboard. I can live with the software glitches described in other posts as I’m sure vzw will provide OTA updates for them at some point. I’m disappointed more in Verizon for not providing Opera Mini (which is available in Brew…just VZW doesn’t offer it).
Even some of the HTML browsers they offer on their other phones would be better than the mobile web junk.
Verizon needs to step away from the software design of their phones and let the manufacturers work that out.
Will anyone tell me if there is a way to put my own music on the sd card and have it recognized on the card without having to get the special usb wire and do it through there program? Please. Thankyou.
@Jim - Here is my tutorial for just that http://techupdate.blogvis.com/2008/06/23/sync-music-to-your-env2/
How do I upload images and music from my mac into my enV2? I was told this was possible, but have yet been able to get it to work?
Help?
Thank you.
g
@ginette g: images - http://techupdate.blogvis.com/2008/06/18/how-to-sync-your-lg-vx9100-or-env2-with-a-mac/
music - http://techupdate.blogvis.com/2008/06/23/sync-music-to-your-env2/
SoccerLife08… Thank you, I will give those a try and let you know how it works out. Called Verizon, that was useless!
Also, I do have a 2GB micro card, so I thought there might be an easier way to transfer the files from my MAC to my Phone?
I am usually pretty adept with these things, being the lab-tech for a local college, but this really has me feeling sub-par.
I use my images to show concepts to prospective clients, and am hoping I can get this all to work.
Thanks again for the links.
I remain,
g
@ginette g: Also, you can use the music tutorial for pictures, just simply copy the pictures onto the sd card in the folder my_pix. Hope that helps!
OK… So I was able to get my images onto the card, but… the phone will not recognize them? My old enV used jpg’s but the enV2 doesn’t seem to recognize them?
Any thoughts?
sigh…
Thanks again,
g
@ginette g: did you format the card first by putting it into your phone and going to menu > setings and tools > 9 > card memory > options (right soft key) > format.
does anyone know if the phone connects to vcast when you play songs from your microdisc? it always says opening and vcast music on the front screen but i dont want to be charged once my free month is up and i cancel the service, but i dont want my phone to end up being completely useless to me.
@crb099 - No, when you open the music application on your phone, it does not connect to vcast unless you click n view in store or any other links from inside the application.