The LG BL-40 Chocolate has caused quite a buzz with it’s sleek lines and widescreen form factor. I’ve been using one for a week now so it’s time to give some thoughts…

If you’ve not already seen them, take a look at the unboxing photos. The first impression you get is one of quality – the red top and bottom contrast nicely with the high gloss black finish and the scratch resistant glass screen finishes the package nicely.

In terms of usability the capacitive multi touch screen offers a smooth and generally responsive feel. The widescreen form factor of the phone is a mixed blessing. Yes, videos look great and handholding it in landscape becomes easier, so typing messages using the on screen QWERTY keyboard is pretty simple. On the downside you’ll be conscious of it in your pocket – on more than one occasion I felt like I was going to snap it in half when I sat down (it did survive though)

In the box

 

As you can see, you get all the essentials in the box – USB cable, earbuds with microphone and the installation CD for the sync software. Also included (but not pictured) is a mains charger.

As a multimedia device

MicroSDHC compatibility let me test music and video playback easily by copying a random assortment of files to the card and seeing what the phone did with them.

The Chocolate handles MP3 playback well, dealing with my standard mixed bag of tracks at various bitrates from 128kbps up to 320kbps. Sound quality seemed good – at least on a par with everybody’s favourite MP3 player – and it drove my crazy big Sony headphones through the standard 3.5mm jack with plenty of volume and no distortion.

Video wise the phone will playback MP4 and DivX files. The 800×345 resolution screen is an odd “extra-widescreen” format but in common with most of LG’s recent high-end phones it looks pin sharp and vibrant so no complaints there.

Testing a few different video formats I found that the DivX AVI files played back fine while the high definition .MKV files weren’t recognised. (No great surprise there to be honest but it was worth a try). Surprisingly .MPG files also didn’t play – granted they’re not really common any more but you do still find them.

The Chocolate comes with “Dolby Mobile” – an audio processing engine that in theory compensates for substandard headphones and makes music and videos sound better. It does do a surprisingly good job with the built in speaker – if you find yourself watching videos on the phone then the Dolby mobile processing will come in handy.

You won’t like what it does to the sound on decent headphones but still, it’s nice to have the choice.

FM Transmitter

The phone includes an FM transmitter to send MP3’s to the car stereo. That works well and is capable of delivering clear and clean (albeit low volume) sound in areas where the radio spectrum is empty. If you’re in an area with a lot of radio stations then finding a spare channel could be a problem; the transmitter doesn’t have the power to punch through the commercial radio stations on either side of the selected frequency so the sound can be intermittent and full of interference.

I don’t think the BL-40’s FM transmitter is much worse than any other in that respect so I’ll just say it works as well as can be expected, subject to the environment.

Software

Getting videos and music onto the phone can be done in one of two ways – either copy them directly onto an SDHC card or use the included software.

The LG sync software is, for the most part, friendly and easy to get to grips with. It will sync your contacts and calendar from Outlook or from its own contact/calendar interface.

One thing that I found annoying was that the phone treats “music” and “everything else” as two distinctly different things. When you plug the phone in to the computer, it asks you what you want to do with it. You can use it as a USB storage device to drag and drop files to the SDHC card, you can transfer contacts or you can sync music. While you’re in the “music” mode you can’t transfer contacts or video. Likewise, when you’re in any other mode you can’t transfer music.

The Music mode does allow synchronisation with Windows media player libraries but it’s still a pain to treat separately.

There’s also fun with videos. The LG software will convert existing video files from various formats to play on the phone, but it’s a lengthy process. The end quality is fine but waiting 30+ minutes for a file to copy is just painful.

Both the music and video hassle can be bypassed by just using the phone in “storage” mode, treating it as a drive and dragging your content onto it from Windows. You don’t get any video conversion or automatic music synchronisation with your existing library, but it’s a *lot* less pain.

As a phone

Yes, people still do use mobile phones to make phone calls! The LG fares well in that regard with logical and simple contact/keypad/text functions. They’re all pretty standard implementations of the “S-class” user interface concept debuted on the Arena, so I won’t go into any real detail.

The only difference is that in some of the applications the extra-widescreen form factor is used to present a “split screen” view in landscape mode, allowing more to be shown. The messaging application benefits particularly from this.

The rest

You get a 5MP camera with LED flash which has face detection, geo-tagging using the on board GPS and various special effects. The chocolate also shoots video and a front facing camera allows for video calls.

Conclusion

What’s not to like? It looks slick, has a great screen and does a good job with multimedia. For web browsing the more standard 800×480 screen on competing devices offers more viewable area, but for videos and texting the “mars bar” shape of the Chocolate works well.

Check the ergonomics before buying (i.e make sure it fits in your pocket) and ditch the supplied software for transferring music and video. Other than that, add it to the shortlist.