Verizon Wireless unwraps a new flavor of Chocolate, now with a cool scroll wheel and spinning lights. Is the new Chocolate nice and crunchy, or are they simply nuts?
Review summary of the LG VX8550 Chocolate:
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 Don't let our numbers fool you, the LG VX8550 Chocolate is a real improvement over the previous Chocolate phone, the LG VX8500. If anything, our standard have gotten higher as the multimedia phone market reached a crest, and then toppled with the release of the mighty iPhone. A year ago, the VX8550 would have been a real stand-out, but now, even with all of the improvements, such as the cool scroll wheel, we can't help but feel that the phone lacks a single outstanding feature. It packs in plenty of features, and for the price buyers should be happy to find themselves playing music, navigating with GPS and watching videos. Still, the best-selling feature phone could stand more improvement. Release: September 2007. Price: $100.
Pros: Great scroll wheel, improved touch-sensitive buttons. Better calling options. More rounded, shinier, thinner than previous version.
Cons: Scroll wheel is underused. Lacks some messaging features. Poor camera quality. Stuttering videos. Lackluster music player. No necessary music accessories included.
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66%
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Full review of the LG VX8550 Chocolate:
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Design - Very good
Starting with the LG VX8550's design, it is easy to see that LG has made some smart changes to the popular Chocolate phone. The center button is now a click wheel, similar to what you'd find on an Apple iPod, except that the wheel itself actually spins. We like this navigation method quite a bit, though we wish that scrolling was implemented in every aspect of the phone. Instead, we found ourselves pressing up and down on the wheel to move through many of the options and applications on the phone. Though the wheel was helpful when it was used, it simply wasn't used enough. The touch-sensitive buttons on the phone have also seen some improvement, and are now much more responsive. They also respond to your touch with a soft vibration, a very pleasant bit of haptic feedback that we liked.
The interface is just as slick as the last Chocolate phone, and makes nice use of a circular motif to mirror the scroll wheel. It's still the exact same Verizon Wireless V Cast menu structure that you'll find on every multimedia phone the carrier sells, but of all the manufacturers, LG has done the nicest job slapping some lipstick on this pig, with this phone and other recent models like the LG VX8700. At least accessing LG has provided dedicated buttons to access the music player and camera, but this still doesn't excuse the archaic, uninviting menu system. To wit, the WAP browser is hidden under the "Get it now: News and info" submenu. You can't get much more uninviting than that.
The phone's buttons are very small, but are well rounded to make typing easier. Typing was not easy, but with some care we were able to avoid most typos in messaging. Besides, we spent most of our time spinning the wheel, which has dancing lights that spin around the circumference as you spin the dial.
Calling - Very good
Within calling features, we find even more improvements to the original Chocolate phone. LG has added a speakerphone, and we were pleased with its volume and clarity. Overall, calls on the new Chocolate sounded good. We heard some buzzing on the low end of vocal tones, but words sounded clear. Reception was a problem, as we only got a couple of bars of EV-DO service in our lower Manhattan office, and even fewer bars of 1X phone service, but this never seemed to affect call quality. This was also in line with our recent reception tests of the Verizon Wireless Q9m. Battery life has more than doubled since the last version of the phone. We got more than five and a quarter hours of talk time in a call, up from just over two hours previously.
The LG VX8550 also supports speaker-independent voice dialing, one of our favorite calling features, and this worked perfectly in our tests. Three-way calling was easy and intuitive, and Bluetooth pairing went off without a hitch. The address book was a bit light on fields; we missed not having an address or miscellaneous notes field. Also, though we're sure third-party options exist for desktop synchronization, without an included USB cable or software, we were simply left wanting.
Messaging - Very good
The messaging apps on the LG VX8550 Chocolate are another study in how a phone can suffer by a carrier's omission. Users of AOL, MSN and Yahoo for instant messaging and e-mail are all in luck, as the phone comes with preloaded options, or at least preset download links, to handle all of your needs. The rest of us Gmail and POP users are out of luck. We use MSN for instant messaging, and the app worked fine, though the time between sending and receiving messages was not what we would call instantaneous. Typing on the keypad was fine, despite the small keys. We would have liked better integration between the contact list and messaging recipient fields, but we were pleased to see that a single message can be sent to SMS and e-mail recipients, drawing numbers and e-mail addresses from our address book in a few menu steps. The phone displays characters neatly, and can fit an entire 160-character SMS on screen for incoming messages.
Camera - Mediocre
Unfortunately, the 1.3-megapixel camera has seen no discernible improvements. Images were blurry and surprisingly noisy, even in well-lit areas. Edges of objects were messy-looking in our shots. Color seemed accurate, but with all the other issues, we're still declaring these photos unusable. Even viewing pics on the small phone screen, it was obvious that they weren't going to look good at full resolution. If you have low standards for pics, you can still print and transmit photos via Bluetooth, or send them using MMS or e-mail messaging. You won't want to, but you can.
Video - Good
The LG VX8550 Chocolate gets the full V Cast treatment, which means loads of short clips to stream and music videos to purchase. We were impressed by the offering, which included plenty of exclusive content, but not so much by the video quality. Streaming videos were very choppy, and lips never seemed to sync with voices. Initial buffering wasn't bad, but a few times during streaming videos, the playback would stop in the middle to rebuffer, and this usually took longer than the initial load. Downloading videos also took a long time, about five minutes for a five minute video, and playback was disappointing. Though the Chocolate can display videos full screen in landscape mode, videos from the phone's memory were still a bit choppy, and didn't still didn't sync sounds and lips. Scrubbing through pre-loaded videos worked quickly, though, and we were happy to find stereo Bluetooth worked well with the video content.
Music - Mediocre
The music experience on the LG has seen some slight improvement from other V Cast music phones, but still lags far behind the best in the multimedia phone class. The simple player has options for preset EQ settings, as well as some repeat and shuffle options, but lacks a robust interface and control scheme. Overall, the feel is still similar to first-generation music phones, and Verizon Wireless could learn something from heavy-hitters like Apple and Sony Ericsson when it comes to bundling a music player with a phone.
The new chocolate will work with some high capacity microSD cards, up to 4GB. Not that any cards are included, mind you. Nor will you find a USB transfer cable or even stereo headphones. We tested the phone with our stereo Bluetooth headphones, but if we didn't already have a pair, we would have been stuck, as the phone uses a proprietary LG connection for headphones. We can't stress enough our feeling that it is wrong to call a phone a "music phone" without including the necessary accessories to play music.
Web browsing - Good
The new Chocolate phone choked on our homepage, decrying its own "insufficient memory" to load all the images. Textually rich pages, like Slashdot, loaded very quickly and looked great. The nuances of text styles came through, and the few images on Slashdot's front page looked good. Navigating with the scroll wheel should have been much easier, but still offered an improvement over standard clicking. The wheel jumps the cursor from link to link, so scrolling still wasn't smooth, and we would have liked an accelerating scroll, but with some fast thumbwork, we were still able to get to the bottom of Slashdot's long column in no time.
GPS navigation - Very good
We had a good experience using VZ Navigator on the new Chocolate phone to navigate through New York City and the New Jersey suburbs. The phone did a nice job tracking our movements, and was fairly accurate counting down the distance to a turn, even as we decelerated. A couple of times, the location based service started us in the wrong spot, then had trouble correcting itself without a restart of the program, but this was a rare occurrence.
Price and availability
The LG VX8550 Chocolate phone is available from Verizon Wireless for $100 with a two-year contract agreement and an instant online discount of $50.
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