This Chocolate wants to melt in your hands, but is Verizon Wireless' new touchscreen music phone really so luscious? Find out in our LG Chocolate Touch review.
Review summary of the LG Chocolate Touch:
 |
|
Scoreboard » Features » Side-by-side » Gallery » |
 The LG Chocolate Touch is a fun, high quality phone for making calls and listening to music. If LG had simply stopped there and not tried to do so much with their first tablet-style Chocolate phone, we'd probably be much happier with it. Call quality was solid, and battery life was great, without resorting to a massive, heavy power cell. Music sounded great on the LG Chocolate Touch, which gets an audio boost from Dolby Labs, and there were even some gimmicky, fun features that let you play along with your favorite tunes. Sure, we wish there was better sync software for media, and the menu system seems like a halfhearted attempt at emulating a smartphone OS, but if you don't mind using Windows Media Player to sync, and if you weren't looking for a real smartphone anyway, the LG Chocolate Touch isn't a bad choice. If any other feature is important to you, though, from social networking to Web browsing to e-mail for both business and pleasure, you'll want to avoid this phone like a spastic dancer with two left feet. The onscreen keyboard is completely unusable, and the other features are so undercooked, they're raw. Video playback didn't work; messaging was confusing, difficult and buggy; and many extra features were buried under Verizon Wireless' disorganized, lingering interface. If you like the style and music is your life, the LG Chocolate Touch wouldn't be a bad choice, but if you want anything more from your phone, go for something smarter. Release: November 2009. Price: $80.
Pros: Great music playback with some fun additional features. Solid call quality with better battery life than we expected.
Cons: Lousy, unresponsive touchscreen hurts many features, especially messaging. Besides music and calling, little to recommend on this phone.
| Poor |
Mediocre |
61%
GOOD |
Very good |
Excellent |
|
|
|
Full LG Chocolate Touch Review:
|
Look and Feel – Good
The LG Chocolate Touch on Verizon Wireless is a departure from the glossy piano black and chrome of its predecessors, or even the bright and colorful flavored Chocolate phones that came after. But that doesn't mean it's a boring old tablet phone. In fact, the design is rather striking, with some nice contours on the phone's face, and a cool chrome and soft touch paint job on the back that reminded us ever so slightly of a fancy party dress. The phone ships with two different battery covers, one in black and another in a striking soft touch purple. It's slick and somewhat feminine, but not so much that men will want to hide it in their man-purses. Unfortunately, it's also one of the rare tablet phones these days where the exterior far outclasses the interface design.
Instead of the fancy flash-based system of earlier LG Chocolate phones, the LG Chocolate Touch tries to emulate a smartphone OS, mostly Android. There's a home row of buttons on the bottom, though music, easily the phone's best feature, is shuffled off to a tiny tab on the side. You can drag icons in and out of drawer-like menus, and some of these are even functional widgets, like the notepad. But these features mostly work poorly, and some hardly work at all. For such a great music phone, the LG Chocolate Touch spends a lot of time trying to deny its existence.
LG should have taken a page out of Nokia's playbook with the latter company's XpressMusic phones. The phone should be focused on music, with playback controls on the exterior shell, instead of a simple button to jump to the Music menu, and an OS that's built around diving into your music library and playing your tunes instantly. Instead, the LG Chocolate Touch is bogged down by the same old poorly organized Verizon Wireless menu structure that we've been complaining about for years now. The graphics have been given a splashy new paint job, but its still a bland grid of icons.
The display on the LG Chocolate Touch suffers from being unresponsive. It's a resistive touchscreen that feels very soft, so you have to press hard to make the phone register your taps, and often the interface will just ignore you anyway. This hurts the keyboard especially. The onscreen keyboard on the LG Chocolate Touch is among the worst we've used. It was easy to accidentally skip letters or hit the wrong key, and the phone isn't smart enough to correct for common mistakes. We dreaded typing in every application where the keyboard popped up.
Calling – Very Good
As a basic phone, the LG Chocolate Touch did a nice job handling our calls. Calls sounded clean and clear for the most part. There were some occasional static pops on our end, and our callers said we could sound distant during some of our calls, but our voices still sounded good. Reception was okay, usually hovering around 3 bars of EV-DO service, and dropped calls were never a problem. For battery life, the LG Chocolate Touch did far better than Verizon Wireless promises. We managed just under 6 hours of talk time in a single call, which is an hour longer than we expected.
For calling features, the LG Chocolate Touch packed all of our favorites. The phone gets visual voicemail support, and we're pleased to find visual voicemail making its way down the line from its smartphone roots. It's a great feature, and you'll like being able to listen to messages out of order and delete the ones you don't need with a simple tap. The phone connects conference calls easily, though it's impossible to split a 3-way call once merged. There's a dedicated button for voice dialing, and the speaker-independent system worked well in our tests. There's also a button to toggle the speakerphone, which is a nice bonus. That speakerphone is fairly loud, too, the way we like it.
Music – Very Good
Music is a high point on the LG Chocolate Touch. We tested the sound quality of our tunes against other musically-inclined phones, like the Apple iPhone 3G and the Nokia XpressMusic phones, and the LG Chocolate Touch sounded better than both of these, thanks to the improved sound and deep EQ options from Dolby Labs. The preset equalizers on the Chocolate Touch managed to kick up the bass or separate the voices as we requested, and our music sounded very good played through our own high quality earbuds.
The LG Chocolate Touch doesn't come with any music transfer software, and Verizon Wireless even ignores the issue in the phone's user guide. We had no trouble synchronizing the phone with Windows Media Player, but Mac users will be left out for this device. You can always sideload music to a microSD card, and the phone had no trouble drawing our music files from the external memory, but the internal 1GB of storage wasn't accessible from our Mac, only through Windows.
The onboard music player looked nice, and playback control was very simple. It was easy to navigate the music library menus to find our tunes and create new playlists on the phone. When you're playing music, you can even control playback and browse your songlist from the phone's main standby screen. If you want to maximize battery life for music, for a long airplane ride, perhaps, you can activate a music-only mode, and the phone will shut down its radios. We appreciate the 3.5mm headphone jack up top, but it would be nice if the phone would pause our music when the headphones are pulled out, instead of switching to the loud speaker.
There are a bunch of fun features included with the music player. The most notable is an onscreen drum kit that offers some drums, a few cymbals and, best of all, a cowbell. You can tap along to add a heavier rhythm section to your favorite tunes, or perhaps add the beat that those a cappella songs have been sorely missing. Of course, this was hampered by the unresponsive screen, but we still had fun pounding out excessive beats with our Joni Mitchell songs, or offering more cowbell to Blue Oyster Cult. There's also a vibration feature that pulses in time with your music, and a nice visualizer effect you can turn watch during playback. These are all gimmicks, sure, but fun enough to play with on a long train ride, and they set the music player apart just a bit.
Social Networking - Poor
On Verizon Wireless' online store, they advertise the LG Chocolate Touch with "quick access to Twitter, Facebook, [and] MySpace". Nothing could be further from the truth. You don't get dedicated apps with features from these popular social networks, and you won't want to use the horrible, sluggish Web browser to access the mobile versions. Instead, LG offers a quick menu where you can send a text message to update your status on these sites. You read that correctly, a text message is what Verizon is dubiously calling "quick access." Of course, you can send the same text message from any phone, so the LG Chocolate Touch offers no better social networking than the cheapest feature phones you can get free with a contract agreement.
The LG Chocolate Touch comes with some e-mail apps on board, but these gave us too much trouble to be worth the effort. There is a corporate e-mail app that claims it can access a Microsoft Exchange server, but it was never able to synchronize with our work e-mail account (or our corporate contacts and calendar info). The more basic e-mail app was able to find our Gmail, and for simple e-mail reading, the Chocolate Touch got the job done. But we never wanted to type on that lousy keyboard, so reading is all we accomplished.
For more basic messaging, the LG Chocolate Touch tries, but doesn't quite deliver. Text messages can be grouped by date or by sender, but this didn't come close to the effectiveness of a truly threaded chat view, where messages are shown in their entirety in a conversational format. On the Chocolate Touch, we could only see the first few lines of a message at a time, even when grouped by contact name. The phone also gets the most basic of IM clients, with support for AOL, MSN and Yahoo.
Traveling – Good
The LG Chocolate Touch gets turn-by-turn navigation capabilities from VZ Navigator, and we were pleased to find a fairly advanced version. For navigation, the Chocolate Touch didn't let us down. It found us quickly for a first fix and followed us on our route through the Dallas suburbs. VZ Navigator can be confusing to use, with too many different mapping screens and a lack of intuitive controls. But the version on the Chocolate Touch was robust, with a movie feature that gives you local showtimes and speech recognition that lets you say your address to the phone. With a better interface, this would be a great, effective navigation solution.
Everything Else - Mediocre
The LG Chcoolate Touch uses a 3.2-megapixel camera, and it wasn't bad, just mediocre. Most of our images, especially our outdoor shots, looked pretty good, though the camera lacks focus control, and often our shots were completely blurry as the camera aimed for the distant background. Most colors came through accurately, though reds had a tendency to blow out a bit. There were few shooting options available, and no flash to help out in seriously low-light situations. Check out our image samples below.
Pink Flowers
Yellow Light Cycle
Self Portrait, Indoors
Palm Fronds
Self Portrait, Outdoors
Palm fibers up close
eBay Shot
As we mentioned earlier, the Web browser on the LG Chocolate Touch is far below par. Besides being difficult to control on the phone's blunt force touchscreen, the browser is such a simple browser that it can't handle even basic Web pages. You have to feed every page through a Verizon Wireless WAP mobile Web page, and it spits out your eventual destination as a confused, poorly organized shell of what you were hoping to see. The whole process was sluggish and disheartening, and we abandoned the browser after a few attempts.
Though the phone excels at music, it couldn't handle any of the videos we loaded onto our microSD card. Our videos showed up as thumbnails in the player window, but the phone refused to play any of our test files, even the smallest of the bunch, sized well below the screen's 240 by 400 pixel resolution. The phone has access to the Verizon Wireless V Cast Music Store and V Cast Video streaming service, but both of these were expensive additions, and the content wasn't worth the extra cost. We had high hopes for a mobile version of Rock Band that came with the phone as a demo, but we weren't surprised when the poor screen got in the way of the 3-fingered guitar plucking.
Price and availability
The LG Chocolate Touch is available now on Verizon Wireless for $80 with a contract agreement.
|
|
|
|
_it00.jpg)
|
Archive
