2009 was a big year for mobile phones. Taking the latest step in their continued evolution, mobile phones have all but shed their old image as mere portable telephones that helped business executives or medical practitioners make calls, and have as a result embraced a new standing as evolving personal accessories capable of various tasks. Smartphones, which have themselves bee called “one evolution in a series of evolutions”, have continued to take newer and more sophisticated forms over the last ten to fifteen years and find more stylized, more stylish frames to contain their increasingly-powerful engines, becoming more akin to handheld minicomputers than the “portable handset” a mobile phone used to be characterized as. Now, mobile operating systems are somehow becoming more streamlined and more user-friendly while paradoxically being more capable and more versatile, able to run various diverse mobile applications.
Toward the end of 2009, LG Group endeavored to put out a new model that blended a great degree of style with a solid batch of features. The resulting new phone, branded the LG New Chocolate, is a rather expensive mixed bag of great-sounding features and variable performance. Simply put, it’s one of the best-looking touch screen candybar phones of the year that has a stunning design and great media playback quality, with a large storage capacity and various connectivity options. However, it’s sandbagged significantly by sluggish performance and slow network response for web browsing, and a sizeable price tag for what you ultimately get.
What you ultimately get is a great-looking “feature phone” that skirts smartphone territory but doesn’t really take a foothold there. It’s unique even in its physical form, being much longer than it is wide, with a sizeable 4-inch display with noteworthy 345×800 resolution with sharp image quality. However, the touch screen is not the most responsive one, which is somewhat surprising and disconcerting for a capacitive display screen. At least media playback looks great on the screen, matched well with Dolby Mobile-supported audio. The images taken with the integrated 5-megapixel camera are also very sharp and display well on the screen.
The non-smartphone nature of the New Chocolate doesn’t necessarily doom it – users might, after all, simply be after other features like web browsing and media playback. It’s true that the phone has a Schneider-Keruznach 5-megapixel camera equipped with flash as well as auto-focus, as well as support for various media including Divx and Xvid format video files, and HSDPA, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity. It also features native email and Microsoft Exchange support, as well as a unique dual-screen capability. However, due to LG’s own S-Class user interface and proprietary software platform, the phone is consistently sluggish and never without a measure of lag time, even for simple things like opening a menu or selecting an application to run. Web browsing takes an especially sizeable amount of time, which is more than a little disappointing considering that’s one of the phone’s last remaining items in the plus column.
All told, the LG New Chocolate is one of the most beautiful new models to hit the stands in 2009, but it’s hamstrung by its own operating system and interface – and nobody wants to be holding a pretty shell while waiting several minutes to be able to fully send an SMS reply or see a basic webpage.
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