| Dimensions: | 97 x 48 x 17.5 mm |
| Weight: | 100 g |
| Display: | 240 x 320 pixels (QVGA) |
Price Range: $79.99 - $149.95
The gorgeous display measures two inches diagonally (320×240 pixels) and supports 11 lines of text. With support for 262,000 colors, it’s one of the most attractive displays we’ve seen on a cell phone and arguably the best on an LG handset. Graphics and animation were sharp, and colors popped. Our only gripes, and these are small, is that the display has a reflective quality and attracts smudges and fingerprints easily. Also, it’s hard to see in direct light and nearly impossible to see when the backlighting is off. You can change the clock style, the backlighting time, and the font size but no other options are customizable.
The Chocolate’s buttons take some time to get used to. The “send” key is where it usually is, left of the cursor pad, but the “end” key is on the side of the phone. The cursor pad, meanwhile, looks like an iPod-style scroll wheel but isn’t – it’s just a cursor pad. And the cursor pad and soft keys are touch-sensitive, with no tactile feedback. The learning curve is sharpened by the beautiful new Flash-based menu system, which doesn’t look like other Verizon phones. (Fortunately, you can kick the phone back into the familiar Verizon menus.)
With the interface, you are able to theme it to fit your personality and style, something we enjoy doing. By default, the phone uses the “Rock n Roll” theme, which places all your menu items in a circle. It almost seems to invite you to use the touch wheel in a similar fashion to an iPod, but really you just need to click to the right or left to spin the onscreen wheel navigation. Once you make your first choice, the submenu is a simple list layout which you tap up and down on the wheel to navigate through. This is the point where we started to get the hang of this thing. As we said before though, you can change wallpapers and themes to your liking. The phone is Get It Now compatible, so there is how you access additional ringtones, games, and other applications as well.
That said, if you’re looking for a music-phone on Verizon, learning the Chocolate is worth the effort. This is Verizon’s best music-phone by a long shot. It supports stereo Bluetooth, playing music easily through our wireless Plantronics Pulsar 590 headphones. It has a roomy 68 MB of on-board memory, accepts MicroSD memory cards up to 2 GB, and – finally – can play both WMA and MP3 files natively in Verizon’s V CAST Music player. You can put music on the phone by dumping it into a MicroSD card, or syncing it via USB cable with Windows Media Player. Verizon has also gotten rid of the $15/month subscription fee for their V CAST Music service, so if you feel like buying songs over the air for $1.99 each, go for it.
A cool perk is the phone supports Bluetooth for talking and listening. This comes in particularly handy for MP3 and music playback, as you can conserve the phone’s battery life while listening to music via wireless stereo headphones. I used the Motorola HT820 Bluetooth stereo headset, and was very impressed. I could crank the music as loud as I wanted with little or no distortion before the volume became painful. I didn’t notice any pops, clicks or anything indicating the headphones were picking up wireless signals.
