LG is currently selling Americans two phones that share almost nothing except a badge, and the one getting all the attention is the less important of the two.
The Chocolate is the one in the advertising. It arrived on Verizon this summer as the VX8500, black and glossy and built to be looked at, and it is doing what a fashion phone does: pulling people into shops who were not otherwise planning to replace a handset. Fine. I have written about that phone already and my opinion of the touch keys has not improved with familiarity.
The enV is the interesting one. It is a slab that opens sideways on a hinge into a full QWERTY keyboard and a second internal screen, it is heavier and uglier than the Chocolate by some margin, and it is aimed squarely at people who have worked out that the thing they actually do with a phone all day is type at other people. No fashion angle, no design house branding, just an admission that text messaging stopped being a teenage novelty and became the primary use of the device.
American carriers have been slower to accept this than European ones, largely because US messaging pricing was punitive for years and suppressed exactly the behaviour it was pricing. That is unwinding now, and the handset lineup is following the money. LG has read it earlier than most.
What I think LG has stumbled into, possibly without fully intending it, is that a keyboard phone does not have to be a business phone. Every QWERTY device before this one was sold to people with corporate email, in grey plastic, with a badge implying you have a job. The enV is sold to teenagers and it does not apologise for its keyboard. That is a genuinely different product category and I do not think RIM has noticed yet, because RIM is busy congratulating itself on the Pearl for looking almost like a normal phone.
The risk is obvious and it is LG’s usual one. The hardware is thoughtful and the software running on it is the same undistinguished carrier stack as everything else, and a keyboard phone lives or dies on how fast the messaging application feels under a fast typist. If that is sluggish, the keyboard is decoration.
Where this goes next is a device that stops making you choose between the two. Somebody is going to put a large screen and a hidden keyboard in one body and sell it to the enV buyer rather than the enterprise buyer, and on current form LG is better placed to do it than anyone else selling through Verizon.