Verizon Wireless Blitz

Reviewed by

Nicole Lee

on 09/03/2008

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Features
The Verizon Wireless Blitz has a generous 1,000-entry address book with room in it for five numbers and two e-mail addresses. Contacts can then be organized into groups, assigned photos for caller ID, and paired with one of 27 ringtones and alert sounds. Other basics include a vibrate mode, a speakerphone, text and multimedia messaging, a calculator, a calendar, an alarm clock, a world clock, a notepad, and a stopwatch. More advanced features include voice command, e-mail support (Yahoo, Windows Live Hotmail, AOL Mail), instant messaging, stereo Bluetooth, and a wireless Web browser. If you want an actual e-mail client (i.e. not having to open up the Web browser to get to your e-mail), you do have to pay $5 a month for the mobile e-mail application, which we think is a little bit much. You also get access to VZ Navigator, Verizon's location-based application for turn-by-turn directions.

The Blitz is compatible with Verizon's V Cast Music with Rhapsody service, but with one important caveat: it doesn't support V Cast Music's over-the-air song downloads. That means that you'll have to download songs to your PC, and then upload them to the phone. This is probably because of the Blitz's lack of EV-DO. Even though we thought this was a bit of a letdown, the Blitz is meant to be an entry-level phone, so we'll let that slide. As for the music player itself, the interface is very similar to that of the V Cast Music store, with songs categorized by genres, artists, and albums. You can also create and edit your own playlists, and play songs on shuffle and repeat. The Blitz has a microSD card slot capable of supporting up to 4GB of additional storage.

The Biltz took decent photos.

The Blitz also comes with a 1.3-megapixel camera, which can take pictures in four resolutions (1,280x960, 640x480, 320x240, and 160x120), six white balance presets, four color effects, and you can capture pictures in either portrait or landscape mode. Other camera settings include a self-timer, shutter sounds (with a silent option), plus brightness. Photo quality was pretty decent, with crisp detail and not much blurriness. We did think the color was a little on the dark side, though.

Thanks to Verizon's Get It Now service, the Blitz has a number of personalization options at your fingertips. You can customize wallpapers, screensavers, and ringtones, simply by downloading graphics and sounds via the Web browser. The Blitz doesn't come with any games, but you can also download them via the Get It Now store.

Performance
We tested the Verizon Wireless Blitz (CDMA 800/1900; 1xRTT) in San Francisco using the Verizon Wireless network. Call quality was very good--callers heard us loud and clear and vice versa, with nary a static blip. Calls still sounded like they came from a cell phone (not nearly landline quality), but it was still pretty good. Speakerphone quality wasn't that great as it sounded pretty hollow and tinny on our end, but callers said we sounded almost the same, so we give that a positive score as well.

Music quality wasn't too bad, but as we said, the speakers aren't that great. We definitely recommend using a stereo headset to listen to your tunes.

The Verizon Wireless Blitz has a rated battery life of 4.7 hours of talk time and 11.7 days of standby time. According to our tests, it has a talk time of 4 hours and 36 minutes. According to the FCC radiation tests, the SAR rating is 1.19 watts per kilogram.