LG has managed to bowl everyone over with the introduction of the extravagant LG New Chocolate BL40 this year, a handset of the stylish Black Label series of the manufacturer. The LG Chocolate BL40 is unlike any other touchscreen phone. Its stunning, ultra wide display has a true cinematic 21:9 aspect ratio and gives the handset a very distinct tall and thin profile.
Besides the impressive screen, though, it’s bursting with other cool features, including a 5 megapixel camera, FM transmitter and DivX support. Beside all that features LG has packaged it in an extremely slim and neat piano black chassis that really looks the business.
You can tell by the styling that this phone is meant for the user who likes to enjoy looking at his or her phone as much as using it. The chassis is a combination of metal and glass, with vibrant red plastic at either end, with the top housing the 3.5mm headphone port and the power/lock key. This handset’s key feature is its fantastic 102mm (4 inch) capacitive touchscreen.
The left hand side of the LG BL40 Chocolate has a dedicated music key to take you straight to your tracks, which needs to be held down for a while to get it working. A similar system is on place on the right hand side too, where the volume up and down buttons are built into the chassis like a kind of wave, and the camera key is a raised, metallic ellipsis.
The Chocolate runs the company’s S Class user interface. It’s bright and colourful, with well designed icons and some slick animations, including a funky rotating 3D cube that you can use to swap between different menu screens.
Like the few LG devices that run on the same user interface, the Chocolate BL40 also supports widgets. The choice, however, was limited to very basic functions and there’s no option to download more mini apps. Compared with Samsung’s TouchWiz software, LG’s solution was less robust in this aspect.
Despite LG having switched from the AMD chip it used in the Arena to a faster Qualcomm processor, the Chocolate still feels slightly sluggish, and can be slow to respond to screen taps. Also, we aren’t all that keen on either of the text entry options.
In portrait mode, you’re presented with a standard mobile-phone keypad with multiple letters per key. In landscape mode, the full Qwerty keyboard layout is rather cramped, so we often ended up hitting the wrong key. Matters are made worse by the fact that the predictive text system isn’t as good as that of the iPhone or Hero.
Calling friends on the LG BL40 Chocolate is a much more pleasant experience than before; with the length of the phone raising call quality somewhat. The phone dialler has the older version of smart dial, where it will recognise the number coming up and offer phonebook options containing that combination.
From the favourites menu you can access the basic functions you need when calling – ie voice and video, editing and so on. The same things are available from the main listing too, but with more settings to play with, such as moving the storage location. When searching for a contact from the list, you can either scroll through manually, use the side tab to move or enter the friend’s name into the search bar.
Connectivity is excellent, 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.
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. Audio playback sounds top-notch from both the music player and the video player.
The camera on the LG BL40 Chocolate is a decent 5MP effort with a single LED flash, and the de rigeur Schneider Kreuznach lens set. Shots taken in good light look pretty impressive by smart-phone standards, and there’s a very cool panoramic mode in which the phone tells you where to point the lens for each shot in the panorama before automatically stitching the pictures together. However, the LED flash isn’t really strong enough to overcome the camera’s poor low light performance, though, so night shots tend to suffer pretty badly from digital noise.
There’s only 1GB of storage onboard the LG BL40 Chocolate don’t forget, which is fine for a few albums but you’ll need to buy a separate memory card if you’re going to extend this further with a few films. Battery life on the LG BL40 Chocolate is sadly very poor.
The screen might look very pretty, but it must absolutely drain the power source, and these days 1000mAh batteries aren’t big enough for this kind of device. Using the internet on and off for an hour drained the battery down one bar, having the Push Email running in the background did the lifetime of a single charge no favours, and the video player really ate into the power too.
LG’s latest iteration of its Black Label series ranks tops in terms of appeal. If the design of a phone is important to you, then the Chocolate BL40 is worth considering. LG has done a great job rolling out a handset with such a great design as the New Chocolate BL40.
