If you are looking for a distinctive phone to complement your style, the LG Venus could be what you are looking for. It features a QVGA display screen which can be operated by a secondary dynamic touch LCD control pad located below it

The main screen is an ordinary TFT screen with a lovely 262k colors & a resolution of 320x240. This is accompanied by what LG have name their 'InteractPad™' which is a contextual touch screen interface with a resolution of 240x176. The InteractPad provides the main mechanism to navigate the phone, & the softkey menus appearing will alter depending on the options obtainable. For example, when you are listening to music, soft keys like Play, Pause, Forward & Backward will appear on the InteractPad. Otherwise when browsing through the menus, you will see Up, Down & Okay soft keys.

Perhaps because it has a quite distinctive dual screen, the operating technique offered has to be distinctive to the phone. As such, you don't get the ability to extend functionality in comparison to a phone walking a Symbian or Windows Mobile operating technique, but it does support Java so you should be able to find a lovely range of applications to do the work you need. Bundled with the phone are built in hands free application, video & photo albums, & voice memo ability - not bad, but perhaps not the most feature-rich phone on the market either.

The LG Venus, whilst having everything you need in its touch screen & TFT section, also has a slide our numerical keypad. This is because LG found that people enjoy touch screens, but found it hard to text on them, so they are offering a bit of both worlds.

Although the LG Venus supports the 3G network, it lacks WiFi connectivity - this shouldn't be a problem with a lovely date package.. Battery life is not a concern as the LG Venus has up to 20 days standby time & 4 hours of talk time.

Unfortunately, the camera is pretty featureless - 2.0MP, with no autofocus, flash, & no zoom (either optical or digital), but can record videos. Photos are taken at a 1600x1200 resolution.

All in all, this phone seems to be five that focuses on style & ease of use than lovely hardware, & there's lots of phones out there with much more to offer. But, for its price, it seems that you can't go far wrong with an LG Venus.

The audio player on the phone supports the formats you'd expect it to; AAC, eAAC, & MP3 - not diverse, but there's functions to pick from. Videos can be played back in the popular MPEG4 format. Whatever memory format you pick, the 64Mb will only fit a few songs - luckily this can be expanded by the use of a MicroSD card up to a size of 2GB.