LG BL40 Chocolate Review

The LG BL40 Chocolate mobile phone is unique due to it’s cinematic widescreen display that has an aspect ratio of 21:9 allowing it to play feature length movies with no borders top or bottom. With the BL40 having a large aspect ratio screen the phone is longer than your average mobile phone and though pictures seem to show the phone being a little over sized, when holding it you’ll find that it actually works very well and sits in your pocket very well.

The front of the phone is covered in tempered glass and has a nice glossy shine to it. There are no buttons on the front of the device and it’s just a smooth piece of glass that has just the ear speaker cut out. Both the top and bottom ends of the phone are accented in a vibrant red while the sides continue on the glossy black look of the front along with a thin silver strip that runs the length of the phone on each side. On the back of the phone the black gloss look is continued with just a small cut out for the 5 megapixel camera lens, flash and a small microphone.

The phone looks fantastic, and perhaps I’d go on to say it’s one of the best looking phones LG have created.

All buttons on the phone are housed around the edges of the phone with the top edge having the power/lock button along with a 3.5mm standard headphone jack. The left side of the phone houses the USB/Charging port and about half way down the phone on the silver strip a dedicated music button can be found.

On the right side of the phone you’ll find buttons also being part of the silver strip that contains volume up/down as well as a dedicated camera shutter button.

When switching the LG Chocolate BL40 phone on you are presented with the usual S-Class 3D splash screen after which you have a slide up to unlock screen that when unlocked you are presented with the standard widget screen that is capable of showing functions such as the clock, email/message/voice mail/missed call information, weather details and other various widgets that you can move around the screen as needed.

As with other S-Class 3D phones you have the 4 menus that work on the cube system. First one, mentioned above, is the widgets screen followed to the right by a contacts screen, followed by a browser screen and then on to your short cuts screen. Pushing the cube at the bottom right of the screen reveals a 3D cube that you can rotate around. It’s not that handy if I am honest due to it being just as quick scrolling left or right on the home page, but I do think it looks quite fancy especially now that the 3D cube is actually dynamic rather than static like previous models of phone using this interface. To clarify what that means, on previous models the cube had the same images represented on the faces regardless of where your widgets were on the screens or what contacts you used. On this version on the BL40 the rotating cube actually shows exactly what’s on each of the menus. It’s not a huge feature but a welcomed touch.

The big menu on the system is accessed by pressing the blue square with 4 white dots in. My only gripe about this menu is the screen’s aspect ratio makes it a little more difficult to work with. The icons are quite large when in portrait mode and this only allows 3 icons running across making you need to scroll several times to get to the icon you want. When rotating the phone to landscape mode the icons all fit on the screen but are a little small making it difficult working out what icon you want. But, if you use the phone for a few days I am sure this can be looked over as you get more familiar with the layout of the phone.

The camera has a 5 megapixel sensor and can capture some nice images if used correctly. As with most other LG phones the camera has a lot of good features that allow you to tweak the pictures to get some artistic style shots. A couple of the best features are the ability to blow in to the microphone to steam over the screen and then wipe the steam away with your fingers. Another cool camera feature is how it deals with panoramic shots. With all other phones I have used you capture several images by aligning up a shadow of the image and then push the camera button. On the LG BL40 you simply just rotate the camera around and align up the green boxes together and let the camera do the work.

On to email and messaging… Exchange support is available although it’s not as good as Windows Mobile on this side, it still allows you to sync up your emails and send/receive. The virtual keyboard works quite well and gives you the option of a QWERTY in landscape mode or a T9/tap style keypad arranged like a numeric pad in portrait mode. One of the things I really like about the email functions of the phone is the split screen that it uses. In a similar way to how Outlook works, it can display who the messages are from on the left of the screen and on the right it shows the contents of the message. The split bar running down the middle of the screen can be adjusted by dragging it left or right while the phone is in landscape mode to give more or less screen estate to what you choose.

Overall the phone is very nice to look at and looks very sleek. Screen quality is amazing as is sound quality on earphones and video quality on the wide 21:9 aspect screen. Colours on the screen are bright and vibrant and the phone works well with the S-Class interface.

The main downside of this phone and other LG phones that use their own operating system is that there isn’t a way to expand them in the way of an app store like Apple, Microsoft, Palm and Google have for their range of phones. It would be nice having the ability to access an app store and download both free and paid apps to expand what the phone can do. It certainly has the potential to be a great phone but being closed off this way makes other options a little more attractive for me. This is not to say it’s a bad phone at all. I personally just like to be able to expand my phone with extra apps to customise it more to what I want to do.