The LG VX8500 cell phone, also known as the LG Chocolate, is now available from Verizon in the United States. The LG Chocolate has a very nice look which bears resemblance to Apple’s iPod, except it’s in black and it slides open to reveal the keypad. The phone itself is a combination of a media player and a cellphone and it has a great look, but the design is a bit flaky.
At first glance, the LG Chocolate phone looks just like a black iPod with a 262k colors, 240 x 320 pixel display. It has its main media controls on its front navigation wheel and it features additional media buttons on the left side. It is small and lightweight, and the dialing keypad is revealed by sliding down the bottom part of the phone. Sadly, the touch-sensitive navigation wheel is hard to use - it’s either too sensitive or too hard to press, depending on the settings you give it. The ‘End’ button used to turn the phone on and off and to terminate calls is also small and in a counterintuitive location. The cell phone is also reported having trouble reading ID3 tags from MP3 files, and the music software is not as good as it should be.
Overall, the LG Chocolate phone is still a very handsome phone with all the technological features you would expect in today’s cellphone. If you can get around the somewhat flawed design and software, it is a very good mid-range cellphone for the portable music enthusiast.
LG Chocolate Specifications
- Form: Slider
- Dimensions: 3.80″ (H) x 1.88″ (W) x 0.69″ (D)
- Weight: 3.53 oz.
- Networks: CDMA 800MHz / 1.9GHz
- Display: 240×320 pixels, 262000 colors
- External Display: None
- Digital Camera: 1.3 megapixels
- Internal memory: 64mb
- Expandable memory: microSD
- Battery: 3.5 hours talk-time, 16 days standby
- Other: Bluetooth Stereo, Multimedia player
LG Chocolate Reviews
CNET reviews the LG Chocolate and gives it a 7.0 rating - “The LG Chocolate has a sharp design; satisfying overall performance; and a multimedia-rich feature set that includes Bluetooth, a digital music player, and a megapixel camera with admirable photo quality. The LG Chocolate’s unique touch pad and controls entail a steep learning curve, and the phone suffers from poor streaming video quality and low talk-time battery life. The lack of a speakerphone is disappointing. Though the LG Chocolate is beautifully designed and offers a respectable mix of features and performance, it doesn’t quite live up to the hype.”
PC Magazine has a review of the LG Chocolate and writes - “That said, if you’re looking for a music-phone on Verizon, learning the Chocolate is worth the effort. This is Verizon’s best music-phone by a long shot. It supports stereo Bluetooth, playing music easily through our wireless Plantronics Pulsar 590 headphones. It has a roomy 68 MB of on-board memory, accepts MicroSD memory cards up to 2 GB, and – finally – can play both WMA and MP3 files natively in Verizon’s V CAST Music player. You can put music on the phone by dumping it into a MicroSD card, or syncing it via USB cable with Windows Media Player.”
Phone Scoop reviews the LG Chocolate - “ Many people will buy the Chocolate based on its looks alone, and for those people, it’s probably a perfectly good phone. It is an excellent performer in many regards - battery life, Bluetooth usage for calls and music, and messaging.”
LG VX8500 Chocolate Phone (Verizon Wireless)
LG VX8500 Cherry Chocolate Phone (Verizon Wireless)
