The only features I want are the ability to place/recieve calls reliably (which includes letting me know immediately (not days later) that I have voice mail) and maybe bluetooth so I can push phone numbers onto it from outlook. Oh yea, and to have my phone freakin' charge when I put it in the charger? Is anyone else disgusted by the "desk charger" they packaged with the VX4500?

I neither want nor need a color screen, camera, calender, games, mp3 player, internet access (though I would like to be able to use it as a modem, especially if it has BT), this "Get it Now" junk, voice activation (unless it works as well as it did on my old Moto 120e (with which I recorded a sound snippet for each person I wanted to be able to reach via voice-command).

I have a PDA, MP3 player, camera and laptop to take care of e-mail/organizing, music, pictures and games. I don't need these duplicated in a less-useful manner in my phone.

Any suggestions? Unfortunately I'm locked into Verizon for a while so I'm restricted in which phones I can choose from.

So my VX4500 wouldn't turn on this morning. It might have been when I slammed my fist into it last night to try to get it to charge for the 3rd time since I got home from work. Maybe two days ago when it told me a week late that I had a voicemail and I threw it against the wall. Who knows?

Luckily I had my old Motorola lying around and I turned that on and will be using that until I reach the upgrade in my contract in a year. I'm almost happy about it. Seriously, what did my 4500 have that my 120e doesnt? A color screen? For what? The crappy backgrounds and the little start-up animation? Games? my 120e has better games! Blackjack, snake and brickout! I have to pay for those, presumably, if I wanted to play them on my VX4500. The 120e doesn't have "get it now" which I only ever activated by accident. It has better voice activation features. The VX4500 had better battery life, but I ended up with more downtime because of dead batteries because 2/3 of the time when I tried to charge the battery in the desk "charger" I'd wake up the next morning without the battery having charged at all. My 120e stays on silent mode when I tell it to be in silent mode, unlike my 4500. I could even turn off the vibrate all-together and have the phone do nothing when someone calls me. With my 4500 sometimes I'd take it out of my pocket and it'd be in "driving mode" or "manner mode" would be off and the ringer would be on max volume.

My VX4500 had a speakerphone, and was a flip phone which made it smaller than my 120e.

Verizon took $20 off the first month of my plan after I got the 120e. They paid me to use the phone. I had to use all my free-phone upgrade dollars, plus extra for the carrying case/belt clip, to get my wholly inferior VX4500.

The 4500 does suck. I've seen too many of them with too many problems. However, its been out of production for some time and the LGs we are seeing now are greatly improved (although I personally still dont trust them). Now, about your phone hopes... Most VZW phones that have Bluetooth do not have the ability to push contacts to a computer (I think its done with the OBEX or OPP profiles) because VZW restricts Bluetooth on all of their phones, excepting one. The Nokia 6256i was an indirect release only phone that had unrestricted Bluetooth (this doesn't mean it had every possible Bluetooth profile, just that VZW didn't cut the profiles that it was engineered with). This phone AFAIK can push contacts (I haven't seen it do so, but I have seen it push and receive other data like pictures). The phone is also out of production, but recently so, and you should be able to find it like new or lightly used on eBay or something.

Actually, by now I've gotten a new phone with my "New-every-two" contact with VZW. The saleswoman at the store assured me that the vx4500 was a blight upon both the LG brand and VZW as a carrier. She was pushing the vx8300 (buy 1 get 1 half off, key for me since my brother also needed a new phone at the time) and so I went for it. There was a 15 day free trial period, so if I'd really hated it I could've gotten one of the samsungs I'd been eying.

Honestly, I love the phone having just reached the end of the 15-day trial.

I found BitPim (www.bitpim.org) which can push/pull photos, ringtones etc to/from the phone over BT or presumably the USB cable (though I haven't and likely won't buy a cable for the phone).