PCD Venture (Virgin Mobile)

The PCD Venture ($99.99) is aptly named, as it is something of a venture in and of itself. You may find yourself drawn in by the promise of an inexpensive, keyboarded Android smartphone?with Virgin Mobile's excellent plan pricing, but proceed with caution. This phone has a cramped keyboard, a disappointing camera, short battery life, and generally low-end performance. If you see this phone on the display rack, you'll almost certainly make a better choice if you venture elsewhere.

Design, Call Quality, and Plans
The Venture measures 4.6 by 2.3 by 0.5 inches (HWD) and weighs 4.3 ounces. It's nice and compact for a keyboarded smartphone, and feels relatively solid. It's made of matte gray plastic, with a plastic silver band outlining the face of the phone. It feels pretty classy?until you turn it on. PCD manages to fit in a 2.8-inch display, but at just 320-by-240 pixels, it looks dim and grainy. Even when held over a foot away from my face text looks jagged. There are four physical function keys right beneath the display, which sit on top of the phone's four-row QWERTY keyboard.

Although they are made of a nice, grippy plastic, the keyboard's keys are cramped and tiny. I found it difficult to type without accidentally mashing my finger into other keys, so typing long messages is no simple feat. Keyboarded phones are usually built for texting, but in this case you'd almost be better off with a touch-screen-only phone.

The Venture is a dual-band EV-DO Rev. A (850/1900 MHz) device with 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi. Reception is average (Virgin uses Sprint's network), but call quality is middling at best. Voices sound fine in the phone's earpiece, but have a tendency to clip in and out. Calls made with the phone sound fuzzy and computerized, with poor noise cancellation. The speakerphone sounds extremely muffled, and is not loud enough for outdoor use. Calls sounded fine through a?Jawbone Era?Bluetooth headset ($129, 4.5 stars), and voice dialing worked fine over Bluetooth without training. Battery life is poor at just 4 hours and 10 minutes of talk time.

As is the case with many phones from Virgin, the biggest selling point here is the carrier's inexpensive pricing plans. You can sign up for an unlimited data, text, and Web plan for as little as $35 per month with 300 voice minutes. 1200 minutes costs $45, and unlimited voice calling brings the price to $55 per month. If you're more of a message and data user than a talker, that $35 plan is hard to beat?especially considering that a data plan alone will cost you $30 on a carrier like Verizon Wireless, and for that price you're limited to 2GB of data per month! There's no tethering or hotspot mode, so you can't use a laptop with this connection. And Virgin does have one downside for heavy data users: Although you get unlimited data, your speeds will be significantly throttled after 2.5GB of usage per month.

OS and Performance
The Venture is running Android 2.3.5 (Gingerbread). There's no word on an update to Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich), but I wouldn't count on it. PCD has modified the standard Android lock screen and added Mobile ID, but that's about it. There are five home screens you can swipe between that come preloaded with some useful apps and widgets, like a battery saver app. There's also some bloatware, but thankfully, almost all of it can be deleted. Mobile ID lets you customize your device with downloadable theme packs from Virgin that include applications, ringtones, wallpapers, and widgets.

The phone is powered by a severely outdated 600MHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S1 MSM7627 processor. Even a year ago this was a low-end part, and it really shows. The Venture turned in some of the slowest benchmarks we've seen in recent memory; you can definitely count this phone out for high-end gaming. Even swiping between home screens can feel too taxing. You should be able to use most of the 400,000+ apps in the Google Play store, but they may not always run well.

Multimedia, Camera, and Conclusions
The Venture comes with 144MB of free internal storage. There's also a microSD card slot beneath the phone's back cover with a preloaded 2 GB card; my 32 and 64GB cards worked fine as well. Music tracks sounded fine through both wired headphones as well as Altec Lansing Backbeat?Bluetooth headphones ($99.99, 3.5 stars). I was able to play AAC, MP3, OGG, and WAV test files, but not FLAC or WMA. Standalone video support is spotty. The Venture plays MP4 and H.264 test files at resolutions up to 800-by-480, but not AVI or XviD files.

The 2-megapixel camera comes equipped with an LED flash, but performance is poor. There's a long, 1.4 second shutter delay, and no matter the lighting, photos show average color but are generally soft and lacking in detail. The camcorder follows suit; it records small, grainy videos at a low-resolution 352-by-288-pixels. In both cases, you'd be much better served by a cheap digital camera.

While the PCD Venture gets you all the trappings of a smartphone at an inexpensive price, it just doesn't do anything particularly well. The Samsung Replenish?($99.99, 3 stars) over on Boost gets you the same keyboarded form factor and similarly inexpensive plan pricing, but has better voice quality, a more usable keyboard, and boasts an eco-friendly build. The LG Optimus Slider?($199.99, 3.5 stars), meanwhile, costs $100 more, but gets you a larger, sharper display, and a roomy, slide-out QWERTY keyboard. It's worth it.

Benchmarks
Continuous talk time: 4 hours 10 minutes

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