Review: LG Chocolate BL40….Bigger Is Better!

Overview

Remember the tasty LG Chocolate, which was released a couple of years back from LG? Well it would seem that after its unrivalled success, LG are trying their hand again by introducing the LG Chocolate’s successor, the LG Chocolate BL40. We managed to get our hands on this slick and sexy new phone to see whether it can offer LG the same success as its older LG brother.

Review

The Second Generation Chocolate is a country mile away from it’s predecessor slider. A high-resolution flat widescreen is what display you get this time, and let me tell you it’s great. The BL40 is directed towards cinema-like movie playing (hence the large display) and desktop style internet browsing.

The first thing you notice….the BL40 is long, too long in fact. It’s actually a full 2cm longer than the iPhone, but if you don’t mind the joke of “what is that?” being asked 24/7 then you’ll benefit from it as it’s pretty good once you get used to it….honest! On the positive side of it being freakishly long, it looks great and the typical Black Label Series build quality is there, with sleek black front and back panelling with a red top and bottom….lovely.

LG’s previous attempts at a touchscreen phone the Arena KM900 and the Viewty Smart GC900 looked good, but not half as good as the BL40 looks it really is a cracker!

‘Strangely unique’, is how I would describe the design of the LG chocolate. For example LG have packed the phone into a thin piano-black chassis, and it just looks different to any other black phone I have ever seen….which is a surprisingly relief!

So back to that screen. Before we start it will be the talking point of many a jokes so I won’t try to hide that it does look strange from you, but if you can look past it then you’ll be on to a winner. The 4″, 800×345 resolution display has a 21:9 aspect ratio as I said earlier, it’s just like your watching a movie in a mini cinema (if you want a comparison). When working in landscape mode, this means the screen is considerably wider than it is tall. That turns out to be both a good thing and a bad thing in the end….let’s go into this because it’s important.

It’s a positive thing for a number of important reasons. Firstly, the extra width means you can view movies in their natural 21:9 aspect ratio, with the result that they look absolutely brilliant and quite unlike anything I’ve ever seen on a phone, especially as the display is very bright and has a reasonably high resolution of 800×345 pixels. The extra width has also allowed LG to introduce a neat split-screen view in the messaging applications, something I’ve not seen on a phone before: contacts are listed on the left-hand side, with messages appearing on the right, just like with standard PC applications which appears very neat. It also means Web pages fit across the screen without you having to scroll back and forth, as you must with pretty much every other smart phone around and this can be very annoying.

The downsides are that, as the display is also very narrow lengthways, so when you do view web pages in landscape mode, the rendered text is very small and appears quite difficult to read unless you have pitch perfect vision. Consequently, you usually find yourself having to zoom in to increase the text size to a more acceptable level and this gets tedious quickly. This defeats the purpose of having the wider screen which is a major feature of the phone, as, once you zoom in, you then have to scroll back and forth, just as you do on other devices so there’s no difference. Also, when you use the landscape keyboard in the browser, email or SMS applications, it practically fills the entire screen, leaving just a couple of lines of text at the top and this can be a nightmare when you want to look at what you’ve wrote. I can’t help but say that LG may have been better off just making the screen in landscape mode bigger because then all these problems would be solved.

LG's fun S-Class interface has been tweaked to embrace the BL40's web utilities, and it certainly differs from that on the Arena for example. The very first time I turned on the phone I was very impressed with the layout and how the menu works and it made me want to explore a lot more. Sadly though it didn’t last and I kept on finding different things that I felt just didn’t work as well as they could of. For example from the main menu you can look at it either in normal or landscape mode, now in normal mode it looks fine with well designed icons etc. but in landscape mode,  i can only describe it as a disaster as there’s literally 32 menu icons to choose from and it just looks too clustered. After about 30 minutes of rooting around on the phone I just wanted my simple Samsung U600 menu back if I’m totally honest.

A quick note on on the SMS side of things, which as with all phones nowadays is a key ingredient in the consumers eyes and it’s not bad. The only thing I would say is that in normal mode it feels a little sluggish and in landscape mode the keys just look and feel too cramped together, which often results in pressing the wrong buttons. Saying that it still works fine, and actually once I’d got used to the landscape version of texting then it worked just fine.

LG should be given some sort of medal for the amount of features they’ve managed to pack into this handset. Connectivity is great, with quad-band support, as well as HSDPA and Wi-Fi for fast Internet access. There’s on-board GPS, which is very quick to find your position, Bluetooth with A2DP support for wireless audio streaming to stereo headsets, and an FM transmitter so you can beam music to a car stereo or home hi-fi will relative ease.

The handset is equipped with a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, so you can easily swap out the supplied stereo headset for your own headphones, this is something I’ve not seen much of on phones but I think it’s a good addition. Audio playback sounds top-notch from both the music player and the video player. As well as being compatible with the usual mobile-video formats, the handset supports both the DivX and Xvid formats which is obviously a great thing as you can watch more films without the need to convert them to the usual 3GP format.

Onto the camera then and it’s a level above those found on the likes of the iPhone. It’s got 5-megapixel resolution, autofocus and an LED flash, what more could you ask for on a phone? The camera can also shoot video (30 frames per second at VGA resolution), and there’s a neat little video editor on-board that you can use to knock your clips into shape but I don’t see why this is there although it is cool I guess.

Battery life is neither good or bad it’s about the same as what you’d expect from a smartphone of this caliber, a charge needed after about 36 hours of normal usage.

The Gaj-It Verdict

Design: 9/10
Usability: 7/10
Features: 9/10

We Say

So where to finish?

After roughly two weeks worth of testing….I actually grew to love this phone. First I liked it, then a few setbacks led me to feel a little let down by it and then after constant usage for about two weeks I did….love it.

The BL40 does have it’s problems and they will be annoying but after a while, I for one certainly found that the negatives were far outweighed by the positives. The only thing that puts me off not wanting to go out and buy one of these phones for myself is the user interface, the S-Class menu system is annoying and unresponsive at times, and in general feels over engineered in the sense that it was trying to be “an iPhone killer”.

It is a great phone, I just don’t know if it’s as good as the iPhone or HTC Hero. It certainly has features that are on a par with both and in some cases better but does this justify?….I don’t think so.

Launch Price: £450 (Sim Free)

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