LG Chocolate 3 Review

Permalink: LG Chocolate 3 Review by Franz Bicar

The LG Chocolate is probably one of the best phones ever produced by LG. It became very popular specially with its slender, candy bar design and its unique touch-sensitive music player controls. It focused mainly on users multimedia experience. Given its popularity, LG managed to make it even better with the release of the new LG Chocolate 3.

There are some notable changes on the Chocolate 3. This is very evident specially with its design. It now has a wide yet slim rectangular body and measures 3.87 inches high by 1.94 inches wide by 0.64 inch thick. This new design makes the Chocolate 3 look and feel like just any other slim flip phone on the market. It now looks ver different from its predecessors.

The Chocolate 3 has a reflective mirrorlike finish on the entire front surface of the phone. It has a 1.76-inch 262,000-color external screen located right above the scroll wheel. The external screen displays the typical caller ID, date, time, and battery and signal strength information when in standby mode.

Inside the phone, users will be pleased with the attractive 2.2-inch 262,000-color main display. With this display, the Chocolate 3 displayed sharp and colorful images. The clean lines of the graphic menu interface complement the display very well. Users have the option to adjust the backlight time, the font size, the clock format, plus the menu layout.

Other features of the LG Chocolate 3 include a 1,000-entry phone book, a speakerphone, text and multimedia messaging, voice command and dialing, a calculator, a tip calculator, a calendar, an alarm clock, a stopwatch, a world clock, a notepad, and a vibrate mode. More advanced users will like the wireless Web browser, e-mail, instant messaging, USB mass storage capabilities, and a support for a robust array of Bluetooth profiles–they include stereo Bluetooth, phonebook access, dial-up networking, printing, file transfer, and more.

As mentioned, the LG Chocolate is more focused on users multimedia experience. Its music player interface is simple with album art display that covers most of the screen. Its player controls are located at the bottom. Music settings include shuffle, repeat, six equalizer presets, and music only mode. There’s also a built-in FM transmitter for three different bands - 88.1 Mhz, 96.1 Mhz, and 106.1 Mhz. The music player supports WMA, MP3, and unprotected AAC and AAC+ file formats. You can multitask while listening to the music as well. Music quality is relatively good although they could have done a better job with its bass. But the overall quality is good enough. Also, users might want to get a good pair of headphones for this music phone.

The LG Chocolate also has a very decent camera. It has a built-in 2.0-megapixel camera which is an improvement over its predecessors. It can take photos in four different resolutions (1,600×1,200, 1,280×960, 640×480, and 320×240), five different white-balance settings, five different color effects, and three different spot photometry modes. Other options include a brightness setting, a self-timer, plus the choice of three shutter sounds (plus a fourth silent option).

Photo quality was pretty good, but nothing spectacular. Images looked sharp enough, but they did seem slightly washed out. There’s also a built-in camcorder that can record up to two resolutions (320×240 and 176×144) in two different times (up to 30 seconds for MMS and up to 1 hour or available memory). Video quality was expectedly low-quality and shaky, as expected from a camera phone.

Sources:
http://www.mobileburn.com
http://gizmodo.com
http://www.cellubration.com