LG Chocolate Touch (Verizon Wireless) Review
The LG Chocolate originated in the year 2006 with its model VX8500 being given a lot of publicity. Now, the fourth version of it is the ‘LG Chocolate Touch’. Implying the name, it has a touch screen with popular chocolate brands and having enhanced features. Actually, LG Company released two Chocolate models having touch screens. One is the LG Chocolate BL40, which includes a cinematic 21:9 aspect ratio, a 5 Mega pixel camera, multi-touch capabilities and various attractive features. But, it is available in Asian and European markets only.
The other is the LG Chocolate Touch VX8575 which is available in India. It is pretty decent, slim and light in weight. It has a wonderful touch display that’s stunningly responsive. The Chocolate Touch is a phone designed for music with special features like an FM radio, a virtual drum kit and Dolby Mobile equalizer settings. The mobile phone is equipped with a 3.2 Mega pixel camera, a full HTML browser and EV-DO. The LG Chocolate Touch is priced at $79.99 with a two year service agreement from the LG Verizon Wireless Company.
The LG phone is identical to the other LG phones such as LG Dare and LG Vu. The cell phone measures 4.3 inches in length, 2.2 inches in width and 0.47 inch in thickness and is rectangular in shape with the edges rounded slightly. The phone is enclosed in a reflective shell and 4 geometric shapes are present at the back end which is covered with a smooth touch material. Two back plates are available that can be changed when required. One has black shapes and the other has purple shapes. The phone’s reflective part gleams like a mirror.
The phone’s display is of 3 inches and is rich and colorful due to the 262,000 color support and a resolution of 400×240 pixels. It clearly points out the color gradients and drop shadows of the graphics. The charging screen, backlight time, the font style of the menu, the size of the dial font and the clock format visible on the home screen can be modified as desired by the user. Two shortcut icons are present on the right end of the home screen which can be hidden depending on your wish. They are the shortcuts to the music player and a bin.
If you press the arrow pointing on the shortcut bin, a pull out menu of applications and shortcuts to media files are displayed, which can be dragged and dropped to your home screen. Some of these shortcuts are complete text boxes, which are available for the calendar, memo pad and clock. Adding / removing shortcuts are also simple and easy. Towards the bottom of the home screen, shortcuts to the phone dialer, the messaging inbox, the contacts list, favorite contacts screen and the main menu are available.
The length and intensity of vibration can be manipulated and a touch calibration wizard is also provided for total accuracy. The LG Touch has an accelerometer that is built in which switches the screen from portrait mode to landscape mode when you turn round the phone. But this feature works in specific applications like the Web browser only. When you rotate the phone to landscape mode while doing a text messaging application, a complete QWERTY keyboard is visible which is convenient for use.
The keys of the keyboard magnify as you touch them and a dedicated “@” key is available which acts as a “.com” key when you press shift. The text can also be typed in portrait mode through handwriting recognition or a 9-key alphanumeric keypad. Below the display, you have three keys; Send, Clear and End/Power. The ‘Clear’ key acts as the voice recorder when pressed for a long time. The keys are shaped irregularly which suits the geometric shapes on the phone’s back end.
The left end of the mobile phone has keys for the volume control, the speaker phone and the charger jack. A 3.5 mm headset jack is located on top and the music player key, the screen lock key and the camera key are situated on the right corner. The camera lens is located at the back of the phone. The microSD card slot is found behind the battery cover.
The LG VX8575 comprises of a huge phone book of 1,000 entries with enough space in each entry for 5 numbers, an instant-messaging user name, a street address and two e-mail addresses. You also have the choice of organizing your contacts into groups; attach them with a snap and a ringtone among the 21 available polyphonic ringtones.
The other primary features present are a speakerphone, a calendar, a vibrate mode, an alarm clock, a stopwatch, a world clock, a notepad, a tip calculator, a drawing pad which is used to make sketches for multimedia messages, threaded text and multimedia messaging, a calculator and voice messaging.
The LG Touch has a unique “Social Network Shortcut Key” which takes you to a menu that you can inhabit with shortcuts to update your photo or status on various social networking websites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace etc. They are not real applications, but just a means to update your social network through MMS or SMS.
The enhanced features available are voice command dialing, USB mass storage and numerous Bluetooth profiles such as A2DP or stereo, hands-free, file transfer, dial-up networking and many more. If you are willing to pay $3, then you can access Verizon’s Visual Voice Mail also. The LG Touch provides 3 options for email namely corporate e-mail, mobile e-mail and calendar synchronization through mobile Web email and RemoSync, which offers quick access to famous web sites like Yahoo Mail and Hotmail.
The phone provides GPS connectivity with VZ Navigator support and the EV-DO support offers V Cast video streaming. The music player is the best feature of the phone with its distinct interface. It groups songs into albums, genres and artists. You have the option of creating and editing your own compositions and playlists. The album art at the centre and the player controls at the bottom are present in the player interface. The songs can be made to repeat and shuffle also.
To load the cell phone with songs, you need to purchase the tunes from the V Cast Music store directly or sync with your system using the V Cast Music with Rhapsody software. In case you are registered with the ‘Rhapsody’ software, you will be allowed to sync the subscribed tunes to your phone. The software is not required. You need to simply drag and drop them to your microSD card. As mentioned earlier, the Dolby Mobile equalizer is the ultimate attraction in the phone.
Five equalizer presets are available namely Bass Boost, Flat, Vocal Boost, Classical and Treble Boost along with a manual equalizer which can be customized at your will. Some of the additional features incorporated are a visualizer effect and a “rhythmical beat” option that vibrates the phone to the song’s tune.
A “Join the Band” option is also available which features a complete drum kit or a scrolling 88-key keyboard in which you can play to the music being played. It’s a bunch of fun though not useful in any way. The other main features of the music player are an FM radio with 12 presets (applicable when connected to a wired headset) and an integrated song ID.
The LG Touch comprises of a 3.2 Mega pixel camera, which captures pictures in 5 resolutions (1,600×1,200, 640×480, 1,280×960, 2,048×1,536, 800×480), 5 color effects and 5 white balance presets. The camera has a self-timer, 3 focusing modes and a special shot mode like Intelligent shot and Panorama. The photo quality is very good. The photos at dim light were dull since no flash is present. Overall, the images look neat, colorful and clear.
A complete HTML browser is available which allows you to browse and surf Web pages which can be seen in a full screen mode. You can also search through a page, add bookmarks and zoom in and out using an onscreen magnifying glass or the volume rocker. Sadly, the search function in the web utilizes only the Microsoft Bing service and if you need to type in a URL, you need to constantly go back to the URL-entry page.
The LG Touch VX8575 can be personalized with ringtones and graphics. If you want more of these, then you can download the desired ones from the Verizon Wireless store. The phone has 2 games: Sims 3 and Rock Band. More applications and games are available in the mobile web browser also. The quality of the call is superb with neat and undistorted clarity even when the speakerphone was ‘On’. The volume of the speakerphone is really high with amazing audio quality.
The speakers didn’t work well with the music playlists. But, the equalizer setting could be clearly distinguished from one another without the need for a headset. With the headset ‘On’, you can enjoy the bass boost setting to the fullest. The EV-DO Rev.0 has a great speed and can download a 2.08MB song within a minute, in 40sec approximately. You can also stream videos from V Cast with ease. The quality of the video was at its best with a slight blur in the video.
The LG Touch VX8575 has a battery lifetime of 5.1 hours and its standby time is 19.6 days. In addition, the LG Touch uses a digital SAR of capacity 1.47W/kg. Conclusively, the LG Chocolate Touch VX8575 is one of the best mobile phones available and can be easily bought with no worries about its features.
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