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LG ChocolateThe LG Chocolate is the sexiest music phone yet, but it could be easier to use. by Troy Dreier 
With its rectangular shape and glossy black exterior, the LG Chocolate has the appearance of a bar of dark chocolately goodness. Living up to its name, the Chocolate is silky smooth in both appearance and in its Flash interface. However, this music phone does have its share of empty calories, with a few hidden costs and touch-sensitive buttons that cause more pain than pleasure.
To use the Chocolate, just slide the front up and prepare to be wowed by its 240 x 320-pixel screen and glowing red, touch-sensitive buttons. The central dial looks like an iPod’s scroll wheel, which is deceptive. On the iPod, you circle your finger around the dial to scroll through menus, but here you need to tap left, right, up, or down to select. You can adjust the sensitivity of the buttons, but no matter which setting you choose, you’ll find yourself pressing them when you don’t mean to. On other occasions we had to press a button more than once for our menu selection to register. Tap the dial’s OK button to call up the main menu, which is also circular, with the default Rock ‘n Roll Flash interface. Use the dial’s left and right buttons to scroll through the menu, then hit OK when you want to select an option. Unfortunately, the End key is on the side of the phone, which takes some getting used to. When you’re ready to rock, just start shopping Verizon’s 1.3-million–track V Cast music store, which is heavy on current pop and rap. Songs purchased through the phone cost $1.99 for a 54-Kbps track, or you can pay 99 cents for a 192-Kbps version of the same song on your computer. The phone has roughly 62MB of storage partitioned for music (good for about 30 songs), but you can add a 2GB microSD Card ($99) to store up to 1,000 songs. The Chocolate’s speaker is on its rear, and it produced a weak, light sound. The phone doesn’t come with a set of earbuds, so you’ll need to buy the $30 Music Essentials Kit for stereo earbuds, which sounded very good in our tests. The kit also includes a USB cable for connecting the Chocolate to a Windows XP PC. The phone works with Windows Media Player 10 but isn’t yet compatible with version 11. With the kit, you can transfer MP3 and WMA tracks to the Chocolate (this is the first V Cast phone that supports MP3s natively). Pairing the Chocolate with a set of Bluetooth headphones took only a few seconds and was perfectly easy. Once done, we enjoyed rich stereo sound in wireless comfort. We got a range of about 30 feet before the sound cut out. When a call came in, we tapped a button on the headphones to answer it and then another when the call was done to return to the music. Note that the Chocolate doesn’t support wireless file transfers, so you can’t transfer songs or pictures to and from your PC using Bluetooth. We put the Chocolate through its paces with Verizon’s new VZ Navigator service, which puts turn-by-turn GPS directions on your phone for a steep $9.99 per month. When we tested the service using the LG V (see our October issue, page 58), it worked very well. With the Chocolate, however, we were often unable to download GPS information. You can also order V Cast VPak service ($15 per month) to view brief news and entertainment video clips. The battery is rated for 3.5 hours of talk time or 384 hours of standby, which is on the low side. Use the music player or the GPS service, as we did in testing, and those numbers are drastically shortened. The Chocolate delivered consistently good call quality during our testing, with no dropped calls or echo on the line. Video clips downloaded quickly over the EV-DO network. Other features include voice commands and a 1.3-megapixel camera, which produces good results if you adjust the settings. We found the Chocolate’s pictures on a par with those from other 1.3-MP camera phones—grainy without much color range. We prefer Sony Ericsson’s Walkman models, which make enjoying your songs much easier. But if you want Verizon Wireless service and you can live with touch-sensitive buttons, the Chocolate might be sweet enough for you. Compare Prices | LG Chocolate Specifications
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