LG Chocolate Review

This is the video review for the LG VX 8500 Chocolate Phone for Verizon wireless.

The phone is made out of shiny black plastic which does make it look more like a toy device than a professional high-end phone. Because of the shiny black plastic, it is very easy to get fingerprints on it.

The front of the phone here, there is a 320x420-pixel TFT display capable of 262,000 colors. Below the display is the touch pad. This is used for menu controls of the phone also for music player controls.

Below it are the numeric keypads. To access the phone menu, you simply press the OK button. There are several different menu options for the phone. Right now we’re using the Jazz Theme but we can change this to the Rock And Roll Theme which looks like this.

The chocolate is considered to be an all-in-one device incorporating any phone, MP3 player and camera. However, like many all-in-one devices, it doesn’t do all three very well. The only part that it does do well is the MP3 player.

The phone portion does work well except in fringe areas where no signal can be picked up. The camera quality since its only 1.3 mega pixel is somewhat lacking. We recommend this phone more towards people that are into fashion and into the latest devices. But as for an all-in-one device, it doesn’t do a very good job compared to other phones.

A better phone for all-in-one device would be the Samsung A990. One of the main features of the phone is the MP3 player. On the right side of the phone is the Micro SD slot. To access the MP3 player, you press the Music Button on the right side. From here, you can access playlist.

Right now it's just reading the card; Playlist, Artist, Genre, Albums, All Song Lists back to Playlist. If you go over here to Albums, select an album that you want to hear. Then from that, that lists all the songs. You can raise and lower the volume. You can also Fast Forward, Rewind, Pause, Resume, or skip to the next song.

While the song is playing, you can still go back and access main menu functions. You press the Clear button and you can still access Menus for instance, if you want to send text message. To get back to music function, press the Music button again.

The chocolate also has a 1.3 mega pixel CMOS camera. Access it by pressing the Camera button on the right side of the phone. So we have different menu options. You can change the Resolution, Self-Timer, Brightness, White Balance, Shutter Sound, Color Effects, Night Mode and back to Resolution. Right now we have this set to the highest resolution which is 1280x960.

To frame the image, press the OK button to take the picture. There is no lag time which is very nice. You can then either choose to Save, Send or Erase the picture. We’re going to save this one to the memory card. Pressing and holding the camera button takes you into the camcorder mode. Several options in there are only Brightness, White Balance, and Time Limit. Right now we have this for available memory which allows us to take videos longer than 15 seconds.

To take the video press the Record button. Unfortunately, there is no way to turn off the sound when recording videos and we will also save this to the memory card. You can also access your picture gallery. The only problem that we had with the camera is that when taking pictures outside, the white balance when set to Auto makes images very blue with the blue tint on them. To correct this, we had to change either to the sunny or cloudy white balance. There’s also an option for tungsten, fluorescent and back to Auto.

Overall, the Chocolate is a nice phone and very easy to operate. Starting the phone open in able to make a phone call, is very simple to do, text messages and picture messages. The reception of the phone due to the internal antenna isn't quite as good as other phones especially other phones with external antennas. In areas where the reception wasn’t very good, fringe areas, the Chocolate was unable to pick up the signal.

Different menu options are for Music, Get It Now, Messaging, Contacts, Recent Calls, and Settings and Tools. Messaging for text and picture messaging, contacts, there is a 500 list for the contacts, Recent Calls, Missed and Received, Settings and Tools such as Sound Settings and Display Settings, and back to the music.