Review: LG Octane
Browser
The Octane's browser is a bit different from Verizon feature phones of the past. It has a refreshed design. The Verizon home page loads with nine shortcuts to content destinations such as Reuters, CNN, and ESPN. It also has a URL bar at the top, as well as a Bing search bar. It's nice to have the URL bar visible from this home page. Verizon used to force people to jump through hoops to leave Verizon's own web pages.
The Octane's browser was consistently slow. No matter what action, what site or what behavior I wanted from it, the Octane took its own sweet time getting things done. Web sites were slow to load, screen transitions were choppy, and the menu system was still frustrating to wade through.
Were it not for the speed issues, I'd call it capable. Once they arrive, web sites look decent enough, and the Octane provides enough screen real estate for viewing content. The full HTML version of Phone Scoop was a little disappointing, in that none of the text was legible when the full HTML site loaded. I had to zoom in to read anything. But when it takes more than a minute for each page to load, there's a breakdown in usability. I often got frustrated and gave up waiting for sites to appear.
Customize
The Octane lets you customize all the standard features of the phone. This means changing wallpapers, assigning ringtones to your favorite contacts, and so on. As mentioned previously, the set-up wizard makes all of this a snap to do, and you can run it at any time.
Verizon and LG have ditched the "favorites" key ( a shortcut to a handful of your most-used contacts) that appeared on the enV3. It's replaced by the Social Beat shortcut.
The main menu can also be rearranged and goes so far as to allow many — but not all — of the default menu items be deleted. The Octane includes a handful of themes, and the fonts can be changed up and the on-screen text can be made quite large or quite small.
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LG Octane
