After all the hoopla with AT&T being the sole provider for Apple's new IPhone, Verizon Wireless needed to come up with an attractive product FAST to compete with the IPhone. After many weeks of suspense and leaked details, in November Verizon finally released two new "Flagship" phones. Made by LG, the Voyager and the Venus were unleashed on the unsuspecting consumer. One huge feature of the IPhone is the fact that it has 8 GB of extended memory for story all your great music and other data. There would no longer be a need to carry around an IPOD and a phone when this would device would serve both purposes. So, Verizon quickly introduced the Voyager and the Venus phones, the only music phones they offer which support the 8 GB micro memory chip. GREAT!
Well, it WOULD be great except that they don't work. Yes, you can insert the chip into the phone. Yes, the "memory" button on the phone will indeed recognize that you have 8 GB of memory installed. Load the Verizon Music Essentials software and connect your phone to the computer however and all the computer recognizes is 1/2 the capacity (4GB) of memory. Start transferring your music and at around 3.6 GB you get a "device full" error and you are done.
OK...so sometimes there are initial problems with new products. I think that we all understand that. There is no excuse however for any company to try and deny that there is an issue and continue marketing and selling a product that does NOT perform as advertised with no warning of any kind to the consumer. After many telephone calls and emails to both Verizon and to LG, I FINALLY got an admission from LG that there is indeed an issue with both of these new phones. It was only after forwarding that information to Verizon that they finally also admitted that the problem exists. They are supposedly working on a solution to it now but apparently it is not as easy a fix as they had hoped.
To make matters worse, as I type this, 3 weeks after reporting the problem to Verizon, they are still not acknowledging the problem anywhere on their site. They are still marketing the phones as 8 GB capable and there is NO mention of the problems in their tech support pages. As of about 15 minutes ago, Tech Support is still trying a couple of approaches when you call in. First, they will tell you that there are no known issues with these phones. After they realize that you know better than that, they will tell you that you need to download and use their latest version of the Music Essentials software and that it will recognize all the phones memory. That too is false and they know it. I don't know why they are telling their customers that story unless they are hoping that it will just buy them some time to find a solution.
At any rate, consumer beware, Verizon is selling their "IPhone Killer" but all is not as it appears.
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