Unlike Voyager, IBEX's payload includes tech tailor made for measuring solar wind and creating a map of the void.

The satellite's payload will consist of two energetic neutral atom (ENA) imagers, IBEX-Hi and IBEX-Lo. Each of these sensors will consist of a collimator that will limit field of view, a conversion surface to convert neutral hydrogen and oxygen into ions, an electrostatic analyzer to suppress ultraviolet light and select ions of a specific energy range, and a detector to identify particle counts and the identity of each ion. IBEX-Hi will record particle counts at a higher energy band than IBEX-Lo. The payload will also include a Combined Electronics Unit (CEU) that will control the voltages on the collimator and ESA and will read and record data from the particle detectors of each sensor. — Wikipedia

[NASA via PopSci]

VISUAL VOICE MAIL FROM VERIZON WIRELESS GIVES CUSTOMERS A NEW WAY TO MANAGE THEIR MESSAGES

BASKING RIDGE, N.J. – The company with the nation's most reliable wireless voice and data network today introduced Visual Voice Mail, a new application that lets customers manage their voice mail on their phones. Available today on the Voyager™ by LG, Visual Voice Mail provides an easy-to-use display screen with one-touch access to listen to voice mail messages. Customers can also delete, reply and forward their voice mail messages without having to listen to prior messages or voice instructions, making Visual Voice Mail ideal for busy professionals who want a more effective way to manage and respond to messages.

Visual Voice Mail allows customers to see a list of all of their voice mail messages with important information, such as date and time of receipt, as well as message duration, in order to prioritize and efficiently manage their voice mail messages directly from their phones. When a caller leaves a new voice mail message, the Visual Voice Mail application pops up, alerting the customer that a new voice mail message has been received. From the phone display, customers can select from a number of options, including call back, reply, forward, add to contacts, and archive message (to internal or external memory).

Customers can store up to 40 messages for 40 days – double the storage capacity and nearly double the retention time of Basic Voice Mail. In addition, customers can create up to 10 greetings, as well as up to 20 distribution lists and 50 distribution members to receive messages.

"Verizon Wireless recognizes that voice mail plays a large role in how customers conduct business and manage the balance between their personal and professional lives," said Mike Willsey, executive director for marketing, Verizon Wireless. "With Visual Voice Mail, we're able to offer customers more options to help them better prioritize voice mail messages from family, friends, colleagues, and business partners in a more timely and effective manner."

Technology Providers

Verizon Wireless' Visual Voice Mail service is powered by Alcatel-Lucent and Comverse. Alcatel-Lucent, a leading provider of messaging solutions worldwide, is deploying the Alcatel-Lucent 5150 Messaging Applications Broker (MAB) which provides enhanced notification and content delivery services for voice, text and video messages through an intuitive visual interface. Visual Voice Mail eliminates the need to dial-in and listen to messages in sequential order, making it easier for customers to manage messages. Alcatel-Lucent is also providing network integration services for Visual Voice Mail.

Comverse is a pioneer and market leader in Visual Voice Mail services, which are deployed over its InSight Next-Generation Voicemail Platform. Visual Voice Mail improves the customer experience with solutions for today's diverse lifestyles and different technologies. New messages are delivered to the handset for one-click access, and message details are displayed at a glance.

Availability and Pricing

Verizon Wireless customers can find the Visual Voice Mail application on the Messaging menu under option 6 on their Voyager by LG phones. Visual Voice Mail is available for $2.99 monthly access, per line, plus airtime or megabyte charges and messaging fees, depending on a customer's plan. Customers should take their Voyager by LG phones to any Verizon Wireless Communications Store to receive the free software update. Verizon Wireless expects to offer Visual Voice Mail on additional devices in the coming months.

For more information about Verizon Wireless products and services, visit a Verizon Wireless Communications Store, call 1-800-2 JOIN IN or go to www.verizonwireless.com.

About Verizon Wireless

Verizon Wireless operates the nation's most reliable wireless voice and data network, serving 68.7 million customers. Headquartered in Basking Ridge, N.J., with 70,000 employees nationwide, Verizon Wireless is a joint venture of Verizon Communications (NYSE: VZ) and Vodafone (NYSE and LSE: VOD). For more information, go to: www.verizonwireless.com. To preview and request broadcast-quality video footage and high-resolution stills of Verizon Wireless operations, log on to the Verizon Wireless Multimedia Library at www.verizonwireless.com/multimedia.

To sum that up, the Instinct is easily the best, most feature rich iPhone clone on the block, and at $129, is a steal for Sprint customers. My major problem with it is the touchscreen itself—I think the Vu's touchscreen is way more responsive. (Wilson likes it just fine, favoring it over Verizon's cloneys.) The Vu has everything superficial down right—the touchscreen, keyboard (best of the bunch) and phone body—but is really lacking in the feature department, and therefore not really worth the new $199 price, which hinges entirely on its Mobile TV function. If you married the Vu's body and touchscreen to the Instinct's features and price, you'd have a champion here, and a serious iPhone challenger. Too bad LG and Sammy hate each other.

The Voyager isn't considered an iPhone clone anymore, not in the strictest sense, though most of its problems stem from Verizon software rather than the hardware. As Wilson said in his review last fall, it's ambitious but flawed—and the flaws are mostly on Verizon. I'm really hoping Verizon lets the Dare just breathe, because the Vu proves LG is best left to its own devices. The Glyde is just a truly terrible phone. Most clay bricks are more responsive than its touchscreen, especially around the edges, and the crappy, sluggish Verizon software doesn't help. And its keyboard ain't much better.

One thing they all have in common is a shitty browser. There isn't a mobile browser that touches mobile Safari yet. Even when they could render HTML correctly, moving and zooming around the page (especially ones that aren't mobile optimized) is an exercise in self-control—how long can you take it before stabbing your eyes out. Opera mini does load on the Vu, and it's better than the included browser, but it worked kinda wonikly at times. For me, that's a critical flaw in all of these phones.

Best to worst: Instinct, Vu, Voyager, and Glyde.

UPDATE: Check out our review of the LG Dare, which gives the Instinct a run for its money

Because it's not truly a "smartphone" but rather one of the most overblown feature phones to date, I will review each feature in its arsenal:

Touchscreen: The Voyager's touchscreen isn't as responsive as the iPhone's, though it is a lot nicer than the TouchFLO experience on the HTC Touch (Sprint's, at least). The biggest innovation is force-feedback: when your finger lands in the right place, you get a bit of a vibration. Immersion's haptic technology is behind this, so it's got momentum, but still a ways from being useful in a blind-typing situation.

The touchscreen's fatal flaw—the dealbreaker—is that it can't be used to scroll through Verizon's own menus. The screen will show a slide-bar on the right side when there are more menu items to scroll down to, but it's next to impossible to grab the bar and scroll. On the rare occasions that I was able to move the slide-bar, I didn't have real control over it. Others that I showed the phone to have had the same problems. And yes, Virginia, I did calibrate the touchscreen. Three times. (I don't know who Virginia is either.)

UPDATE: I want to thank commenter Pikes for suggesting the counterintuitive scrolling technique. "Have you tried pulling the menu UP instead of using the scroll bar?" While it doesn't propel the phone directly into iPhone territory, it certainly does alleviate some of the annoyance I encountered during my testing.

E-Mail: As many who saw our Sizemodo yesterday pointed out, the Voyager is slightly chunkier than the iPhone because it also opens up into a screen-and-keyboard config, like the enV before it. Typing isn't so bad; it beats the Voyager's blatant iPhone-style touchscreen typing, though even that isn't too bad. It's nice to have a choice.When you work your way through the interface though, you see an envelope icon indicating messaging. It would make sense to have that icon represent both messaging and e-mail, but alas, it doesn't. The way Verizon handles e-mail is still half-baked at this point, though my guess this will improve over time. At the moment, it takes many clicks to get to it, even after it's installed: Menu>Get It Now>Tools on the Go>Mobile Email.

Once you're in, you can choose from multiple inboxes from different webmail accounts. I was happy to see how many webmail types were pre-configured; the only noticeable omission was Gmail, but you can always set it up manually. Using the e-mail program was relatively pleasant, but when I wasn't in it, I would only get new-mail notifications from one of my two accounts.

Navigation: I am a big fan of portable GPS navigation devices, so the whole GPS-on-phone thing has escaped me, in spite of its lower cost. The screens are too small and the commands don't have enough detail for my Garmin- and TomTom-spoiled self. But the Voyager's big touchscreen brings easier and better navigation closer to reality. It's definitely the best example of VZ Navigator I've seen to date. That said, the screens are still too rudimentary to compete with the PNDs, and the menu system is a little clunky. But this is something I plan to fiddle with more, because for once I can actually see myself using a phone to navigate.

Music:
On the Voyager, the microSD slot is on the side, easily accessed without yanking the battery out or anything. (And it'll take cards up to 8GB, in case you are curious.) After inserting your microSD card and letting the phone build its file structure (my_pix, my_music, etc.) you can then stick that microSD into your computer's card reader and drag over your tunes. It's a primitive player—it won't look in folders and it won't always play compatible tracks. But the little speakers sound damn good, and you don't need all kinds of Verizon specialty software to load in your own MP3s.

Camera/Video: Just as you can take music from your PC and play it on the phone via the microSD card, you can also take pics and videos and save them to the card to take with you—rather than spending good money MMS-messaging your own pictures to yourself. Photo quality on the 2-megapixel camera is fine in decent light. And shooting with the large touchscreen works fine for both photo and video (files that come out are QuickTime-playable 3GPP2).

Browser: iPhone lovers will tell you that the iPhone has the best browser on any phone, and to date, I think they are right. While the Voyager does its best to capture the styles of a page, it easily misinterprets your finger gestures (are you scrolling or clicking?) and its lack of speed is surprising given the bandwidth advantage of EV-DO over EDGE. I was surprised to see such an advanced browser on an LG phone, but alas, it's still no match for browsers from Apple, RIM or Palm.

There are other aspects to this device that are sure to please some people: it is compatible with Verizon's V Cast Mobile TV service—provided it's available in your area. (When we try to tune in, we get an error saying "No V Cast Mobile TV Signal.") Chronic text-messagers will be excited about the easy-access messaging; call me old-fashioned but I only wish access to e-mail were as straightforward and integrated.

In the end you have a lot of powerful hardware working towards a not all-together clear objective. I like a lot of what I see, and to further the iPhone comparison, it would be nice to see Verizon and LG follow suit and update the Voyager software, but I am not sure that's in the cards. To be worth $300 and the large sums of money you will spend each month on service, this phone needs a smoother touchscreen, a more integrated e-mail system and a much smarter browser. [Verizon's Voyager page]

I'm excited about this phone, which will probably land in the $250-$300 range when it hits in mid November. It's much more of an engaging piece of technology than the enV ever was (in part thanks to a bigger WQVGA screen). Also, as a touchscreen device, it's closer to iPhone than Chocolate, though it does incorporate some snazzy force feedback. Using flicks and drags, you can scroll through long lists of contacts with your thumb, tap on selected parts of HTML webpages using a thumbnail view and swipe through menus and media playlists easily. OK, it's not Apple—not yet near—but it's a good start.

Since it's a Verizon media powerhouse, it has V Cast Music and Video, plus the new MediaFLO streaming TV (where available). On the sideloading front, it will take MP3s, WMAs and non-DRM AACs. And it supports microSDHC cards up to 8GB.

Do I love it? Not sure yet, but I'm definitely interested in giving it a try.

LG's Voyager vs. enV Sizemodo:

From the fact sheet:

The Voyager™ by LG from Verizon Wireless
The LG Voyager* is the first phone from Verizon Wireless that features a large external touch screen. Packaged in a lateral-clamshell design that hides a full QWERTY keypad, The LG Voyager is exclusive to Verizon Wireless and comes packed with a number of cool features, including a HTML browser for enhanced Internet browsing, full V CAST-capabilities - including V CAST Mobile TV, V CAST Music and the ability to play .mp3, .wma and unprotected .aac files, and V CAST Video. These capabilities, coupled with Verizon Wireless' high-speed wireless broadband network, make downloading music or surfing the Web while on-the-go quick and easy.

Other features mobile multimedia addicts will love include:
Speakerphone
VZ Navigator
Picture, text, video and instant messaging
Bluetooth stereo for headsets and speakers
Built-in stereo speakers
2.0 megapixel camera
Expandable microSD memory slot of up to 8 GB

As for regular call functionality, there's AudioIQ noise reduction on board, as well as a few custom earbuds sizes and additional hooks for customizaiton. It lasts up to 7 hours talk time, 5 hours of music listening time, 120 hours of standby, and weighs 10 grams (15 grams with the stereo cable). Price? $149 in October.

This is actually a pretty good idea, allowing you to look somewhat normal with the standard headset, but plug in when you want to rock out to music. Best of both worlds, you could say (if you wanted to be a dork and work in a reference to how Bluetooth headsets are Borg-like). [Plantronics]

– Louis Ramirez
Griffin Voyager and AmpliFi [via iLounge]