We open up Verizon Wireless' most capable clamshell to date, with better music features and fewer flashing lights. Don't miss our in-depth LG Chocolate 3 review.
Review summary of the LG Chocolate 3:
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 The transition from the LG VX8550 Chocolate 2 to the LG Chocolate 3 is kind of like moving from middle school to high school. It's time to be a little less goofy and rambunctious, and instead get serious. In some ways, especially in terms of the music features like the 1GB of onboard memory and the FM transmitter, we like the more grown-up Chocolate. But we miss the dancing lights and fun interface of the original phone, even if it was a bit harder to use and less organized. In making the leap, the phone has settled nicely into the mid-range of 3G multimedia phones, but it has lost a lot of personality in the process. Still, this is Verizon Wireless' most capable mass market phone to date, and perhaps even the best mass market phone in general to be had right now. Release: July 2008. Price: $80.
Pros: Great new music features, including 1GB of onboard memory, FM transmitter and a real headphone jack. Navigation worked well. No more touch sensitive buttons to deal with.
Cons: Not as fun as the last version. Messaging and Web browsing unimproved in the last year. Interface better organized, but less flashy and fun.
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Full LG Chocolate 3 Review:
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Design - Very good
The LG Chocolate 3 is in many ways an improvement over the first two versions of this popular multimedia brand, but in advancing so far it feels like the phone has given up some of its fun. Though the feature set is more advanced and addressed some of our biggest complaints with the originals, the design is much less fun, and dare we say less Chocolaty than we would like. While the second Chocolate was a glitzy slider with flashing lights and haptic feedback, the LG Chocolate 3 takes a more staid approach. The exterior is polished (and fingerprint-prone), but classy, without the flashing lights and touch sensitive buttons. The interior is downright dull, but the larger, square buttons do make for easier typing.
The interface is now more standardized than unique to this phone, reminiscent of the improved Verizon Wireless interface LG has been using on recent phones like the LG Venus. That's a vast improvement over Verizon's older "Get It Now" menu structure, but the phone could still be organized better, and many of the options seemed aimed at driving purchases, not improving ease of use. For instance, under the top level "Games" icon, there are no games, but rather a link to download new applications. It's quite off-putting.
The phone also relies heavily on the external screen, which can be convenient, though the fact that it locks up so quickly was annoying. From the external display, you can access music, photos, the 2-megapixel camera and even check text messages. The semi-circular menu take up a bit too much of this smaller external screen, blocking some images and obscuring the camera a bit, but we liked being able to play music without opening the phone. Plus, the music visualizer on the outer screen reminded us of the old days, when the LG Chocolate was more like a disco ball than a clock radio.
Calling - Very good
Calls made on the LG Chocolate 3 sounded very good. Callers reported a nice, clear sound to our voices, and though there was some noise underneath at times, this never distracted them from the conversation. The phone also packs plenty of our favorite calling features. Thanks to its musical roots, the phone gets a loud speaker. It wasn't very clear, sounding very tinny and compact, but volume was our main concern here. The address book was completely average, with just enough fields to satisfy.
Speaker independent voice dialing worked very well on this phone, and it had no trouble digging names from our address book or dialing numbers as we called them out. Conference calling was easier than it looked. Though the phone didn't give any information about the two calls on the calling screen, joining two conversations for a conference was as easy as pressing the "Send" button. For Bluetooth, the LG Chocolate 3 had no trouble pairing to our BlueAnt Supertooth 3.
Messaging - Very good
Unfortunately, while the music features on the LG Chocolate 3 have seen a nice feature boost, messaging was left mostly unimproved. The phone features pretty much the exact same instant messaging and WAP-based e-mail apps that we were complaining about almost a year ago. Users of MSN, AIM and Yahoo for instant messaging and e-mail are in luck, but everyone else will have to look elsewhere. You can read instant messages on the external display, but since the older Chocolate was a slider and not a clamshell phone, this isn't really an improvement. Happily, the new keys felt more comfortable to us while typing. They seem to be quite flat, but had enough space in between and plenty of travel to make typing a breeze.
Music - Very good
For music features, the LG Chocolate 3 comes loaded, as it should, considering it represents the forefront of Verizon Wireless' new partnership with Rhapsody. The phone packs in 1GB of memory for storing music (and photos and the like), and also features a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, so you can use any headphones you have lying around. Even more interesting, the LG Chocolate 3 features an FM transmitter to broadcast tunes to a nearby radio. It only lets you choose from 3 frequencies, but the low-band 88.1 frequency worked okay in New York City and very well in the surrounding suburbs.
These are all great improvements, and make the music player on the Chocolate much more pleasant to use. The phone features a dedicated "music" button on the side, though we would have preferred a "play/pause" button, like we found on the Nokia XpressMusic 5310, to start the music instantly, and more importantly to stop the music if the headphones are ripped out unexpectedly. The music player itself had a simple feature set, though it packed all the basics, including a preset EQ, playlist creation and options for random and shuffling playback.
The Verizon Wireless music store looks unchanged, even with the new partnership with Rhapsody. The store is woefully behind the times. It is impossible to set up a download queue or to download files in the background, so loading songs is a laborious task. Also, it's strangely impossible to buy a whole album, which means every track has to be tediously downloaded individually. The store has a fine selection, but downloads can be slow, and without a subscription, users are still stuck paying $2 per song.
Web browsing - Mediocre
The Web browser on the LG Chocolate 3 might have been acceptable three years ago, but the OpenWave WAP browser is completely incapable of handling today's content. The browser still crashes trying to load our own homepage. Even when pages did load properly, the interface was cartoonish and outdated, with few effective viewing and scrolling options to make browsing more enjoyable. Again, while music got the upgrade, Web browsing was left behind, and now the browser that felt outdated a year ago feels almost unusable today.
GPS navigation - Good
For GPS navigation, the LG Chocolate 3 gets the latest VZ Navigator 4. It still isn't the prettiest navigation software among the major carriers, and turn-by-turn directions can lag behind actual turns, but the newest version does pack some useful features that we liked. We liked not only getting traffic updates, but also being able to request a detour if we found a route impassable. We liked the improved point-of-interest database that brings useful features, like movie times, right to the top-level menu. We appreciate being able to check the next turn on the external screen, but that screen is big and bright enough that we wish LG had squeezed the whole VZ Navigator map onto it. Also, the sensor seemed quite effective, finding us quickly with no problems even when a direct sky view wasn't possible.
Camera - Mediocre
Images from the LG Chocolate 3's 2-megapixel camera seemed mediocre. In our first sample, taken in our studio lighting setup, the camera managed a good white balance on auto, but lost most of the fine details. The picture has a lot of obvious noise, and the overall sharpnes and definition of the image as low. Perhaps because of built-in noise reduction, some of the smaller details, like the writing on the individual beans, are indiscernable.
Jelly Belly test
Our second image is happy snap of this editor. Again, the Chocolate 3 has done a nice job with white balance, and colors look fairly even and accurate until you creep out to the edges, where the camera has turned our eggshell walls pink. Detail is also mostly lost in this image as you zoom in to the full resolution.
Happy Snap test
Odds and ends
The LG Chocolate now features a microUSB jack for charging and data transfer. We didn't do much with the data transfer, but we really appreciated being able to plug the phone into our laptop to charge. Kudos to Verizon Wireless and LG for ditching the proprietary connections and moving to the standardized USB format. This, coupled with the standard headphone jack, makes the LG Chocolate 3 a much more accessible phone right out of the box.
Price and availability
The LG Chocolate 3 is available now from Verizon Wireless for $80 with a contract agreement.
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