As we finished this review it was reported that Park Soo Heum, chairman of LG Electronics Taiwan anticipates the company will ship 10 million units of the handset this year. Thats a lotta chocolate handsets but will it sell in the UK.
It’s fair to say that LG’s new slider phone fancies itself just a little bit. And although it’s in our nature to take any phone which has been cockily nicknamed Chocolate and knock it down a peg or three, we have to begrudgingly admit that this handset is just as sweet as the Korean manufacturer’s marketing team says it is.
In fact,
it’s quite stunning.
In truth, we’d been hearing rumours about the LG Chocolate phone since
the turn of the year, so we were preparing ourselves for a bit of an anticlimax.
While LG has bolstered its reputation in the last couple of years with some decent 3G handsets and a few laudable imitations of successful Motorola and Samsung phones, it has never been notable for its aesthetically brilliant and original designs. However, the arrival of the KG800 has made a mockery of any preconceptions we may have had about LG’s ability to shake up the mobile market.
Sure, like the other phones born into the RAZR generation, this phone is as slim as a bag of wafers, but it’s the phone’s tactile quality that catapults it into trailblazer territory.
While lying dormant, it boasts a glossy, jet-black finish with a low-key silver trim that gives the phone a very sleek minimalist finish. But while some phones can flatter to deceive when they click into action, this is certainly not the case with the Chocolate. When the KG800 slides smoothly open, the soft keys and cursor keys light up in neon red, which transforms the handset into a geek-boy’s fantasy idea of modern technology. David Hasselhoff’s car KIT in Knight Rider and early dark-screened digital watches probably provoked similar reactions from technology lovers in the 1970s and 80s.
In short, it’s a phone which (unlike David Hasselhoff) you just want to stroke, which is just as well because that’s exactly how you operate the LG KG800. Well it’s more of a feather-light touch than a stroke, which is both a strength and weakness of this phone.
Just as Jeremy Clarkson has so often preached to petrol heads – that a luxury sports car can only be truly appreciated once the owner has learnt to drive it properly, the exact same thing applies to the LG Chocolate. This is a phone that needs to be handled with care, otherwise you’re in danger of sliding all over its icon-based menu system like a calf on roller skates.
In fact, LG is so concerned with the phone’s sensitive tactile qualities that it devotes a huge chunk of its user manual to the kid-glove handling required. These instructions sound fussy, but they’re necessary if you want to avoid calling your boss when you’re actually attempting to play the pre-installed sudoku game while sitting on the lavatory.
Handle with Care - a summary of the LG manual’s tips for using the touch-button phone below.
Make sure
your hands are clean and dry.
Don’t press too hard.
Use the tip of your finger to press exactly on the touch button you want.
Be careful not to touch other buttons.
Touch buttons may not work properly if a mobile phone case or plastic is covering
the buttons.
Touch buttons may not work properly if you are wearing gloves.
Keep metal and other conductive materials away from touch buttons.
In fact, such is the feather-light touch required to operate the joypad or select a menu option that the phone can be infuriating for at least an hour or so while you familiarise yourself with its handling qualities. But once it clicks, we actually found it to be a very pleasant little phone to use. Some will hate it, especially if you tend to be a little heavy handed with your mobiles. But this is very much a phone for the aesthetes amongst you.
The display is excellent and really does justice to the icon-based operating system. The menu is divided into three rows of three icons, and to navigate, a simple touch up, down, left or right will usually suffice.
To save power, the display will black out from time to time if you haven’t touched the phone for a few seconds and users will have to slide the device shut and open and begin again if this happens, which can be a touch frustrating.
There is also a tendency for the phone’s screen to dim to save power while playing the sudoku game and it can prove fiddly to get the backlight back on without disrupting the game. In fact, it’s during gameplay that the phone’s touch-sensitive operation proves annoying. One false press (generally on the top-right soft key) and you can exit a sudoku you’ve been playing for 20-odd minutes, bypassing the save option, and never get the chance to complete it.
Fortunately, there are hard keys on the side of the phone for operating the KG800’s camera and MP3 player. The camera is a 1.3-megapixel snapper and is okay to use. It’s not a snapper that’s going to wow you, but it’ll feature all the digital effects you’ll find on most cameras in the 1.3-megapixel bracket, including nine-frame multi-shot, 4x digital zoom and flash.
As a music player, the device enables you to store tracks in MP3, WMA, AAC, AAC+ and AAC++ formats, and 128MB of built-in memory allows for storage of around 40 songs. Unfortunately, there’s no storage capacity for extra memory, so this certainly wouldn’t be your first choice music player, but it’s not bad for a few tracks on the train.
Of course, there are far better options out there if you’re looking for a music player or camera, but that’s definitely not why you’d choose the Chocolate phone. This is a phone that’s delightful to look at and intriguing to use. In our view there are very few phones out there which can compete with the KG800’s visual and tactile appeal.
True, the touch-sensitive buttons will take some getting used to and you’ll be snarling whenever you lose a game of sudoku that you’ve yet to complete, but if you like the beautiful things in life, then the Chocolate should prove to be to your taste.
This review covers the above mobile phone only and does not address the performance of any 3G Network. The score is based on a 3G mobile phone checklist.
Copyright : You are advised that this material is the copyright of www.3G.co.uk and is our own personal view only. (C) All rights reserved 2005. Whist every care has been taken in the preparation of this review, the author nor 3G.co.uk cannot be held responsible for the accuracy or authenticity of the information it contains, or consequence arising from it.
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