I’ve had it for a week and as you’ve all noticed, I’ve made lots of use of the Dare’s live blogging utilities… but what do I really think? Find out after the break. The Dare is not an iPhone. I think we need to get that out of the way. The Dare does not have a built in iPod and can’t sync up with your iTunes library, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad phone or a good alternative for those not wanting to deal with AT&T. Speaking of which, Verizon may be evil and bent on taking over the world, but their connections and service is light speeds ahead of AT&T.

As for services, the biggest most badass thing about the Dare is its camera. It is the first american phone to be released with a 3.2 megapixel camera (the same as my digital camera has) and can record video at high shutter speeds. Not only that, but the phone has tools that let you crop photos as well as edit videos. For someone with a blog these are welcomed features. In fact, now that I’ve done a simple test run, I’m super excited to test out my live blogging ablities at events or conventions.

The second biggest feature of the Dare is it’s web browser. The browser is much more intuitive than what the Samsung Instinct has going for it, but still not up to par with iPhones full running Safari. But let’s be honest… feature phones can’t run flash video. It doesn’t matter if you have an iPhone, Instinct, or Dare. None of them can do it. So even if the Dare’s browser interface isn’t entirly perfect the internet is still the interent and nothing different that what you are seeing on the iPhone or Instinct.

GPS is all the craze so we probbally should mention the Dare’s built in GPS features. Now I’m not a GPS kind of guy. I’m amazing when it comes to diretions and I never get lost. However, even I found some good uses for the phone’s built in GPS. Not only does it let you track where you are or find directions, the GPS program lets you find out nearby movie times, resturants, stores, and just about anything that you’d nomrally look up in a phone book. Even weirder is that when using the navagator for turn by turn directions it warns you of upcomming traffic jams and re-calculates roots when it senses one ahead.

Now don’t get me wrong… the Dare is not without flaws. It’s biggest problem is the lack of a physical keyboard. Everything is touch screen and if you have big manly hands like mine, it can be super annoying to write long text messages or to type in web addresses. I mean how hard would it have been to give the Dare a sliding keyboard???

Another issue with the phone is more of a Verizon issue than Dare flaw. The iPhone has iTunes multimedia and the Instinct has some live TV channels, but if you have a Dare you’re stuck with lame V-Cast. V-Cast flat out sucks. Not only does it barely have full episodes of TV shows but the footage and compression quality is total crap. When watching an episode of “The Office” I had a hard time keeping track of the the characters and if there hadn’t been audio i would have completely mixed up who was who.

So final comment? The Dare is one of the best feature phones you’ll find at Verizon and it’s completely equal if not surpases Sprint’s Instinct. Even if I hadn’t gotten mine free from a PR company, I defintily would have considered upgrading to it.