It's amazing how differently two teenagers can react to cell phones. When I gave my son a phone to review, he concentrated on the features. My daughter, Jacqueline, used the opportunity to gush about how cool the phone was.

A few weeks ago I handed her an LG Voyager so she could give me a teen's view of the product, and she was not able to contain her excitement. The minute she had the phone in her hands, she ran off to text her friends and share the news of her good fortune. She was now using a cool phone -- a far cry from the standard cell phone that she had been carrying.

The Voyager, running on the Verizon Wireless network, is a sleek, black phone with a large touch-screen on the front and a flip-out QWERTY keyboard, which gives teens the ability to create text messages much faster -- and apparently because it's so much faster and easier, they can create more. At least my daughter seems to be able to create a lot.

At first glance you might wonder whether you need to flip out the phone's keyboard to make a phone call; but with a single touch, you turn the 21\u20442-inch by 11\u20442-inch display into a touch screen numeric keypad that looks like any standard phone keypad. Instead of hard buttons, though, you tap your fingers on the touch-sensitive display to dial your number.

The display of the buttons is plenty big, allowing teens and adults to use it without trouble. Since they are displayed on the screen, LG also had the luxury of being able to make them bright, so they can be used in low-light environments and by adults who have trouble seeing the numbers on the keypads of many standard phones.

My own initial concern that the tactile response from the touchpad would be difficult to master faded quickly -- because LG did a good job providing tactile feedback using a subtle vibration every time you touch a button on the screen. This vibration acts like the click you normally hear and feel on a standard keypad, making it easy to tell when you have entered a digit.

Both displays -- the touch-sensitive one on the front and the standard display on the inside above the full keyboard -- are bright and easy to read. Jacqueline's photo of the New York skyline displays nicely in landscape mode after she personalized the phone. But the 2.0 megapixel camera in the phone has its quirks, making it less than optimal.

Digital camera users are used to the delay that makes it difficult to snap good action shots; but the difficulty is even greater in the Voyager, because the synthetic shutter snapping sound happens before the photo is taken, making the photographer and subject think that the photo was taken before it actually had been taken. So you lose a lot of shots as subjects leave the frame too early -- or stop saying "cheese." Jacqueline also carries a good digital camera, so it didn't have a huge impact. But it would be nice to not have to carry two devices.

Jacqueline's biggest complaint was that the keyboard for texting is too loud, making it difficult to use in quiet environments, such as the movies or -- heaven forbid -- school. As a parent, that sounds like an advantage, though. Keep your eyes on the movie or the teacher! I also like the quick access to emergency numbers, where she stored the numbers of her mother's, brother's and my cell phones.

Jaqueline's article is posted on megabyteminute.com in my new Connected Addendum section.