Verizon Wireless Blitz Phone (Verizon Wireless)

Check out our Verizon Wireless Blitz review, where we slide open the large, full-QWERTY keyboard and wonder where things went wrong.

The messaging apps themselves are wildly inconsistent, very basic and lack the advanced features that the intended audience will really use, like Facebook or MySpace integration.

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Its 1.3-megapixel camera offers a self-timer, color effects, and resolution adjustments in both portrait and landscape modes.

Instead of redeeming this phone with a good music player, a competent Web browser or a fun, effective camera, the phone is strangely a great navigator, which is probably the only feature the tweenage audience won’t be craving.

With VZ Navigator, customers get visual and audible directions to thousands of destinations.

Released for Verizon Wireless, the Blitz is designed with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard for text messaging.

We found this app to be perfectly accurate, an it had no trouble dialing numbers or even jumping to features on the phone at our spoken request.

An expandable microSD memory port holds cards up to 4 GB in size.

Songs can be downloaded to a PC and side-loaded with the included USB cable, synchronized through Bluetooth or played from the speakerphone.

The Blitz has a built-in MP3 player with access to VCAST Music with Rhapsody, for a library of more than 5 million tracks.

The price is right, but the phone is large and difficult to use, so we’d recommend looking elsewhere, like the LG enV2.

This is probably fine for the Blitz’s younger audience, who won’t be as concerned with business and home addresses anyway.

We always try to make sure our specs are accurate and complete; however there may be times when information is not known.

In e-mail and IM, you can hold the special key to select the symbols that hover above the letter, but in text messaging you have to actually dig through a symbol menu, and the symbol keys are unavailable, even for typing numbers in a message.

The phone is somewhat redeemed by the nice set of calling features it provides, but this will never make up for middling sound.

On top of the slide, there are dedicated keys for speech recognition and the speakerphone, but the messaging button isn’t available until you open the keyboard, where you’ll find the tiny mailbox key next to the space bar that jumps directly to Verizon’s messaging menu.