I’ve been using the lg chocolate for the last 1.5 years. Bought it at reliance about 2 years ago and had kept it in cold storage for about 6 months before reopening the box. Don’t remember why i did that now!!! ;-)
Anyway, the phone is a dream to operate. The interface is blazingly fast...absolutely no lag. The screen is vibrant and the marvellous touch sensitive buttons are effortless to operate. Once you slide the phone up, the keypad is revealed underneath. Its not out of this world like the keys on the nokia 6233, but they are adequate enough to get the job done. The subtle white backlight on the keypad looks classy yet understated and looks wonderful in the dark. Speaking of dark, once you close the slider, all the lights on the phone go off, leaving behind a stunnig black rectangle with no features. As i said before, the keys on the front are touch sensitive and only come on when you slide the phone up or press one of the keys on the side of the phone. As a result, there are no surface features on the phone at all, save for the earphone grill and a sqare metallic surface around and within which the touch sensitive buttons appear.
As for the camera, lets be honest....it sucks eggs. Vga cameras are useless for everyting else except for when you want to catch yourself yawning in the morning. And even then the resolution is low enough to be annoyingly bad.
The phone has no external memory slot. Talk about a letdown. The inbuilt 64 mb is pretty much useless as well in today’s 32 gb world. The phone has bluetooth and the connectivity is excellent. It connects to my jabra headset and my laptop in a jiffy and the clarity is great. Strangely enough, the phone doesn’t allow you to make bluetooth calls from the handset. Once a bluetooth headset is paired and connected, one would expect that all phone calls dialled should get automatically transferred to the headset. But that doesn’t happen here.
To make a bluetooth call, i dial the number, then immediately cut off the call. Then i press the call button on my bluetooth headset and the phone immediately dials the number after which i can hear the familiar beep beep of a call going through. Could’nt figure it out no matter what i did so i’ve just gotten used to using the bluetooth function like this.
And another annoyance is bluetooth transfers are limited to pictres alone...you can’t transfer mp3s. What idiot at lg thought this torture up? How does one transfer mp3 you ask? Well, i still haven’t figured that one out. Data cables at the lg service are always out of stock.
What makes this so sad is that lg has bundled by far the best set of earphones i have ever seen in a phone. These babies beat nokia or sony ericsson earphones hands down. The clarity is out of this world. The bass and treble are deep and satisfying and almost provide a surround effect. And they even have a small clip on segment with playback controls and call answer / end buttons. What a pity they are almost unused.
With respect to call clarity...absolutely no complaints. I even receive a signal in basement stores in malls. Take that aircel!!!
Battery life is admirable. 2 days of standby is normal and about 4-5 hours of continuous chatting will still leave enough juice for a few snaps. The box comes with 2 batteries. One is a normal battery and the other one is heavy duty.
The xenon flash is so bright, i sometimes use it as a torch. Theres an option on the phone that allows you to turn in on / off continuously. Dont do it too often though. Turning it on for too long eats up your battery real fast.
One the whole, if you’re in the market for a great looking, competent phone with a bit of oomph factor, you can’t go wrong. This phone is rugged, gives decent battery life and has great call clarity.
The only hiccup is that its hardly available in the market. Gsm versions may be found on the black market. Cdma versions are all gone. The latest lg variants build on the chocolate platform, but they’re big, complicated and gimmicky (lg shine, secret etc.) With all the flashing lights. In my opinion, nothing comes close to the original chocolate in making a statement. I’ve seen a few white versions, but the black version truly oozes sophistication.
Congrats lg. You’ve got style!!!!