The new LG Chocolate is the fourth in LG's Black Label Series. In a world of near-identical touchscreen slabs, the new Chocolate stands out from the crowd with its unusually long form, enormous display and general air of coolness and mystery. Pick the phone up and hold it. The phone radiates quality with its solid weighty feel and tempered glass screen. With its slender form and sleek piano-black cover with red accents it looks more like a bar of chocolate than ever. Resist the temptation to eat it. Turn the phone on and marvel at the fabulous HD display with its unusual cinematic aspect ratio. It's a bright TFT display with 16 million colours and a monster resolution of 800 x 345 pixels, and measures a full 4 inches diagonally. It comes into its own when viewing HD videos or full screen web pages.
The phone uses the S-Class user interface that appears on LG's other touchscreen phones. In some modes the screen splits into two, providing a dual screen interface, that works very well. In portrait mode a virtual alphanumeric keypad is used for text entry, and when the phone is turned to landscape mode, a full virtual QWERTY keyboard is available. Multi-tap zooming is available when browsing web pages. You can also copy and paste with a single touch. It's an intuitive UI, although not really up to iPhone ease of use. The huge screen should have made for a simple touchscreen interface, but LG have instead used the screen real estate to cram in more features and icons, making the whole thing more confusing than it needs to be. Still, its fun and colourful and shouldn't prevent anyone with half a brain from using the phone.
The Chocolate BL40 is an expensive phone, and when you spend this kind of money it's nice to feel that you're buying more than simply style. Fortunately, the new Chocolate packs in pretty much all of the features that you could ask for. To start with the camera is excellent. It has a 5 megapixel sensor with an LED flash and autofocus. Using the camera is very easy indeed via the touchscreen. It may not have the 8 megapixels of a Cyber-Shot or Nseries phone, but it will take excellent pictures under good lighting conditions, although slightly grainy ones in poor light. Video recording is impressive, with full VGA-resolution recording at 30 frames per second, for good quality videos. You can edit videos with the built-in video editor and view them directly on a TV if you buy the optional TV-Out cable. Video calling is also available.
The music player is excellent, with good sound quality, and there's a 3.5mm headphone jack so can plug in your own headphones, or use a wireless Bluetooth headset. The music player controls are very easy to use and the music player is fully featured. The new Chocolate also comes with an FM radio, and there's the added bonus of an FM transmitter that lets you stream music to a compatible hi-fi system or car stereo. We'll mention here too that the media player supports playback of DivX and Xvid movies.
Other features that you'd expect from a high-end handset such as email support and GPS are also present. The Chocolate may not benefit from a huge range of downloadable apps, but at least it has all the essentials built into the S-Class interface, and you can download Java apps to add to the 7 built-in games. Connectivity is outstanding, with USB, Bluetooth and WiFi present, as well as TV-Out and the FM transmitter. Not only is the phone dual band 3G with HSDPA for fast data downloads of up to 7.2 Mbps, but it also supports quadband GSM making it usable globally.
The memory is excellent too, with 1.1 GB of built-in memory and the option to augment this with a microSD card - cards up to 32GB are supported, providing a huge amount of storage for photos, music and videos. Battery life is surprisingly good. In fact, an ultraslim 3G phone with a huge display is a recipe for abysmal battery life, but in fact the BL40 performs better than a lot of modern high-end phones.
We've been looking forward to reviewing the new Chocolate since it was first announced. Now that it's released, it lives up to our expectations. LG are always pushing into new design territory and the Chocolate BL40 pushes the touchscreen phone into a stunning and original form factor. This is a phone that not only looks amazing, but it feels great to hold and use too. Sure, it's expensive and the user interface isn't as intuitive as it could be, but the combination of looks and features makes this phone really stand out - and in a good way.
Features of the LG Chocolate BL40 include:
5 megapixel camera with autofocus and LED flash
Video camera (VGA, 30 frames/second) with video editor, plus video playback with DivX and Xvid support
Display: TFT, 16 million colours, WVGA 345 x 800 pixels, 4.01 inches
Music player (supports MP3, AAC, AAC+, AAC++ and WMA file formats)
FM radio
FM transmitter
Speakerphone
MP3 ringtones (64 voice polyphonic), vibration alert
Messaging: SMS, MMS, email
Java 2.0 games (7 built-in games)
GPS receiver
Document viewer
Memory: 1.1 GB plus microSD slot (supports up to 32GB)
Connectivity: Bluetooth, USB, WiFi, TV-Out, 3.5mm audio jack
WAP 2.0, full screen web browser
Quadband GSM plus dual band 3G (UMTS 900/2100), HSDPA 7.2
Size: 128 x 51 x 10.9 mm
Weight: 129g
Battery standby: 370 - 400 hours
Talktime: 5 - 6 hours
