Today Verizon announced its official fall lineup, consisting of four new phones: the Juke, Pearl, Venus and Voyager. The final one, the Voyager from LG, is Verizon’s much anticipated response to the overwhelmingly popular Apple iPhone. The Voyager is a clamshell device that sports a full touchscreen on the outside and a second screen on the inside across from a QWERTY keyboard. It has a microSD slot and 2 megapixel camera, as well as VCAST Mobile TV. No word yet on availability or pricing, but speculation is to look for the device around Thanksgiving.

I gotta be honest, despite my iPhone fanboyism, when I first saw this phone I said to myself, “wow, that thing is beautiful.” But after I read a little more about the device and did some pondering, my excitement subsided. For one, I’m not a big fan of clamshell phones. My last clamshell was an old school Motorola Razr. Since then I’ve had a Sidekick (slide/flip), Dash (flat) and now iPhone (flat), so I really can’t see myself going back to a clamshell. Secondly, menu design and layout is clearly a ripoff of the iPhone, which I don’t quite understand. LG is a brilliant and innovative company, and I’m sure they could have come up with their own presentation style just as revolutionary as the iPhone. And finally, a friend of mine sent me a related AP article earlier today in which a Verizon executive said in more words that this was going to kill the iPhone. I could not disagree more with that statement. What some people fail to understand is that apart from people buying the iPhone for its revolutionary features, a significant amount of people bought it just because they are loyal to Apple and it was the latest and greatest Apple gadget. Cell phone companies don’t carry similar fan bases, as usually the sentiment associated with them is negative. Thus, while Verizon will surely sell a number of these due to the undeniable chicness of the phone, it’s not going to sell one million in 74 days like the iPhone.