LG Vortex Tech Questions

[darkrecess]

Hello all,

So my wife and I signed up for verizon in march of 2010. We both got LG Chocolate Touch, and we were happy... Until the chocolate touch phones we got both busted. The touch screen on mine died on both the original and the first replacement they gave me. Hers would freeze and automatically restart while she was in the middle of a call, texting, or doing some other task. No idea why.

Now, I have to have a phone for work, so I bought a cheap phone from ebay (a VX10000 - LG Voyager) that worked well enough that I can be in contact with my job whenever I need to be. Unfortunately, it is an older phone and, as such, is beginning to break down. So I decided I would buy an LG Vortex. And I did.

Now, I won't need to use much data. I am around wifi at home, and at work. Pretty much the only time I'm not around wifi is the 20-minute drive to and from work. However, I do have a few questions after reading some reviews of the Vortex.

A) Unremovable Bing? -- I hate bing. I want to lock bing in a trash can, set it on fire, and roll it down the biggest, tallest hill I can find. I want google. I like google. But from some of what I've read, it isn't possible to replace bing as the default search provider?

B) Rooting a phone - I think I understand the theory of this. It's basically running a process that gives you the phone equivalent of administrator rights (if I understand correctly). Is it something I need to do to get the most out of my phone?

C) ROMs - What is the purpose of them? Do I need to find one? Or is it a preference thing? What would lead someone to prefer it?

D) Bloatware - My wife and I make rare use of VZW Navigator, so I would like to keep it. However, most other VCast software I have almost never used, so is there anyway to remove it so that I don't have to worry about it racking up unintentional data charges?

E) Data charges - for when I am not on a wifi network, how can I control data usage? Can I just turn it off, and it only update my widgets when I tell it to update?

F) E-mail - if I don't set up an e-mail box, will that save me data charges? I don't really talk to anyone via e-mail, and most e-mails that I do read are usually not important enough that I need to read them on-the-go. If I can save some data here, I want to.

G) Task killers - I plan on getting one, any suggestions of a good Task Killer for the LG Vortex?

F) Mobile hot-spot - I don't plan on using this feature. Is this an opt-in feature (that is, do you have to choose to use it)? Or do I have to opt-out?

G) Other tips for getting the most out of a vortex?

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Thanks in advance for the answers. While I am experienced in computers (PC's), I am not familiar with smartphones. I pretty much got the Vortex because it looked cool and for the, "Hey, look what I got," feature, not for any real practical use that the smartphone offers. I could easily have gotten a dumb-phone and been perfectly fine, but I wanted to see what all the excitement was over smartphones. I really don't even use much data on my feature phone (either the Chocolate Touch or the Voyager, averaging usually around 1MB a month on those phones). I know with some of the widgets (like weather and news) I will probably use more, but we will see exactly how much more.

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Also, to settle an argument that my wife and I had over this phone, does the vortex use data for voice calls and text messaging? I told her no, it doesn't, but she's stubborn and refuses to believe me. Thanks.

I am going to end this post now before it becomes a giant wall of text. Thanks for reading.