LG BL40 Chocolate : A Smartphone Wannabe

DISCLAIMER:

1) I had this phone only for about 2-3weeks but have been extensively use this phone since then.

2) I am not a professional phone reviewer, but this review is made from a perspective of an end user (which is me of course).

3) I am not a professional photographer, and thereby I’m sorry if the photos are not properly focused and/or do not follow the Rule of 3rd.

4) I am an avid smartphone addict user (WinMo, Blackberry and Android (soon))..and thus, SPEED is really important.

5) I am not affiliated to LG and the dealer of this phone

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Introduction

At first I was planning to buy an Android in which you can see from my previous post, I wanted to buy the Motorola Milestone. However, since I cant see my wallet is “thick” and thus I decided to buy a new “smartphone”. My reason being is that, I’m bored of Blackberry and wanting to try something new AND of course I cant be patient enough. Having said so, I happily went to MG Road and National Market to hunt for something new…and this is my catch

So, LG BL40 Chocolate is a 2009 hit phone because:

1) It is a full touch screen phone from LG, a successor from Viewty series

2) The screen is awesomely beautiful

3) It has a “widescreen” which makes it pleasant to watch movies on it

4) The price is somewhat “cheap” for a multimedia rich phones

A quick glimpse of the specification (taken from www.gsmarena.com)

GENERAL	2G Network	GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
	3G Network	HSDPA 900 / 2100
	Announced	2009, August
	Status	Available. Released 2009, September

SIZE	Dimensions	128 x 51 x 10.9 mm
	Weight	129 g

DISPLAY	Type	TFT capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors
	Size	345 x 800 pixels, 4.01 inches
		- Accelerometer sensor for UI auto-rotate - S-Class Touch UI - Multi-touch input method - Proximity sensor for auto turn-off - Scratch-resistant surface

SOUND	Alert types	Vibration; Downloadable polyphonic, MP3 ringtones
	Speakerphone	Yes
		- 3.5 mm audio jack - Dolby Mobile sound enhancement

MEMORY	Phonebook	1000 entries, Photo call
	Call records	Yes
	Internal	1.1 GB storage
	Card slot	microSD, up to 32GB, buy memory

DATA	GPRS	Class 10 (4+1/3+2 slots), 32 – 48 kbps
	EDGE	Class 10, 236.8 kbps
	3G	HSDPA 7.2 Mbps
	WLAN	Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, DLNA
	Bluetooth	Yes v2.1 with A2DP
	Infrared port	No
	USB	Yes, v2.0 microUSB

CAMERA	Primary	5 MP, 2560 x 1920 pixels, Schneider-Kreuznach optics, autofocus, LED flash
	Features	Geo-tagging, face, smile and blink detection, image stabilization, manual focus
	Video	Yes, VGA@30fps (MP4)
	Secondary	Yes

FEATURES	Messaging	SMS, EMS, MMS, Email, IM
	Browser	WAP 2.0/xHTML, HTML
	Radio	Stereo FM radio with RDS; FM transmitter
	Games	7 incl. motion-based + downloadable
	Colors	Black
	GPS	Yes, with A-GPS support
	Java	Yes, MIDP 2.0
		- MP4/DivX/XviD/H.263 player - MP3/WAV/eAAC+ player - 3D image gallery - Document viewer - Organiser - TV out - T9

BATTERY		Standard battery, Li-Ion 1000 mAh
	Stand-by	Up to 400 h (2G) / Up to 370 h (3G)
	Talk time	Up to 6 h (2G) / Up to 5 h (3G)

In my humble opinion, the specs are top notch for a non-smartphone (from here onwards I’m gonna use the term Dumphones). Having said that for a normal user, this phone would be the best if they only relying on basic phone functions and yet they wanna look “trendy” and “updated” at the same time.

LGBL40 : The Anatomy

I have several photos taken to show what is the box like and how does the phone looks like when holding it.

the phone and the retail package

let see what's inside

Impression: The box is the most beautiful box I’ve ever seen comparing to the other phones I used to have. Since the name itself is Chocolate, even the box itself has the look of a retail package of real chocolates. Inside, you will get a standard 3.5mm headphone (with earplug/earbud) which acts as handsfree, a startup CD and of course a USB cable for sync and charge.

it's quite "tall" isn't it?

the back of the phone showing 5mp camera with LED flash

the top of the phone where the headphone jack and the power/sleep button are located

the inferior part of the phone where u can find the microphone location

On the left side of the phone, only a small compartment for mini USB can be found while on the right is where the volume rocker and camera shutter button are located. Overall, the built of the phone is made of plastic. When holding the phone, you wont have the feeling that it will slipped off from your hand (even if your skin is oily). However, since it is made of plastic and is painted black, this phone is quite a finger print magnet. If this case concerns you very much, I suggest you keep a cloth at hand or try to find a cover for this. I personally don’t really care much of its outer appearance..haha.

LGBL40: The Physiology

1) Menu and Navigation

As been said in the previous paragraph, the BL40 is a full touch screen phone. Considering its TFT capacitive touchscreen I do personally feel that it is kinda hard to get used to. This is because, the screen is supersensitive. At times, you might end up to the different area of the menu when actually you wanna execute other functions and this really annoys me at 1st. However, after acquiring the skills to navigate on the screen I can give it a rating of 7/10. It shorts 3 points because it lags most of the time when shifting from one part to the other.

main menu with Real Icons (portrait)

main menu with Real Icons (landscape)

main menu with Basic Icon

main menu with Basic Icons (landscape)

The best part of this phone is the screen of course. 1st because it has a widescreen (16:9 ratio…this is what I heard) and 2nd the images captured on the screen are extremely vivid. Personally, as a phone user who likes to frequently change the wallpaper, this is a plus points for this phone. However I cant be really have much love for this phone because the screen lags after heavy usage (ie: shifting from messaging screen to music screen). What is the point to have a phone with superior image quality but not impressive enough when it comes to practicality right?

The current trend of touchscreen phones nowadays is having built-in accelerometer and so does this phone. As you can see from the images above, the main menu can switch from portrait and landscape mode. In practical terms, I don’t really find this function necessary, but perhaps for an eye candy. The accelerometer also works on several different areas like :

1) messaging

2) photo gallery

3) music gallery

4) browser

IMHO, to have a phone with accelerometer, you MUST have a processor and dedicated RAM to duly deliver this function at the optimum level. Since BL40 is a dumbphone, the change from portrait to landscape is really a pain in the ass. I find this really stressing in the messaging apps, since I like to type in QWERTY (landscape) mode but because of this, most of the time I ended up using the T9 keypad (portrait). I have to wait for several seconds before I can see what I typed came up on the screen.

Having a full touch screen phone is really awesome nowadays but one cant defy the needs to have a physical buttons as well. In this phone’s case, I rather hope to have a physical keys for navigating on the menu. This is because, when the phone lags really bad, the screen is unresponsive at all and I have to restart the phone before I can use it again. LG should really improve on this area if they wanted to make a full touch screen phone.

What does it mean to have a touch screen phone when one can’t have a multiple dashboards? Well I guess, it is really up to the software developer to have this feature. Having said that, BL40 also comes with multiple home screens but these home screens are fixed. They are arranged into, Widgets, Contacts, Browser and Shortcut. The Shortcut is just a 9 frequently used icons from the main menu, nothing much.

widget home screen (I keep this one as the default one)

contact home screen

Browser home screen

Shortcut Home Screen

Talking about widgets, there are several widgets that can be set up on the Widget Home screen. The ones that I currently have are, weather, world clock, organizer and memo. There are few others like FM Radio, Games etc…but since I don’t really use that function, I rather keep them off the screen.

2: Basic Phone Function: Call, Contacts and Messaging

LG BL40 excels in this part. I never had any issues regarding call quality. The speaker are loud enough even my room mate can hear the person on the other end talking to me. The signal strength also I found to be at its best. At this moment of writing this review I still get full coverage on the signal bar and that really satisfy me. I will show you how a calling screen looks like:

the keypad

When a call is made, the calling screen will pop up. The best part of this screen is, you can customize with any .gif images you downloaded. Sorry I don’t took the calling screen.

When it comes to messages, I’m surprised to see that it also incorporates threaded messaging style. Initially I thought only smartphones have this feature, but I was proven wrong. Well, some might like this feature, but I don’t prefer to do so on this phone. Again, I would like to justify that this phone lags a lot. I did try the threaded messaging feature, but when I wanna reply, to the sender, I will end up with “maximum limit of application reach” error pop-up message (and when that happens, the phone will go into freeze mode..but don’t worry, after several seconds, it will become responsive again).  Thus, I disabled it and happy to live with the old style inbox.

Typing a message on this phone needs a really lot of practice. Maybe because I was used to QWERTY keypad and thus  to revert back to the old style T9, I need to re-adjust my fingers to do multiple tapping. I can always switch to landscape mode to enable the QWERTY (which this phone switches the keyboard automatically), but again, I don’t like to wait. Recalling my moment of distress ( I say distress because I always click on the wrong letter) while using the QWERTY keyboard in landscape, I find it hard to type because the phone will become really wide for your finger to touch from one end to the other. So, if you have longer fingers, maybe the landscape mode will suit you well…for me, I would give up and only use it when I’m typing something long especially when replying facebook comments .

the basic T9 keypad

typing in landscape mode with QWERTY keyboard enabled

Interestingly, there is also option for writing on the screen like you can see on old Palm models. Note that the phone comes with CAPACITIVE touchscreen, there is no way you can use a pointing device for this mode. I did try to write using my nails, but the screen wont register. Instead, the writing is made by swiping the belly of your finger on the screen. Maybe one would ask, why in the world I would wanna use a stylus? My answer is, in portrait mode, there is not much space for you to swipe with your finger and thus a pointing device is a really a big help here. But then again, since I don’t really use this feature, I don’t mind at all.

whoa...a handwriting input?

Other features like predictive text is available and can be activated if you wish to do so. But since I’m not using English as a medium for communication, I never enable this function. Overall, the messaging apps is cool but I can’t type fast enough on the touchscreen because the screen lags and I’m still practice typing on T9 keypad. So if you guys out there who are familiar with T9 keypad, I bet this wont be a problem at all.

If you read a lot about current battles among the smartphones, the users always wanted to have a device that can do “copy-paste”. Well don’t worry, being a dumbphone, BL40 does have that features too.

Coming to the Contact management, I can say that this phone also has the best feature. You can insert a lot of info (such as email, birthday, nicknames ,etc) on that particular contacts in the fields provided (I guess all phones have the similar features by now). While on the Contact home screen, you can set favourite contacts and when one contact is selected, you can choose to call, write message or edit any entries.

the contact screen

another view of contact screen

3: The Applications

Okay, when it comes to a phone which can browse, do lots of multimedia stuffs, have a built in accelerometer and a touch screen, it wont complete unless you have applications to harness all these extra features. Sad to say, the platform on which this phone is built, are made by LG developers. Which means, you only gonna have a limited choice of apps. You can get apps specifically for this phone either from the LG website, or other websites that stores JAVA based apps (mobile9, getjar, etc).

To use the LG grown apps, you need to register your phone with their website before you can start downloading. There are several games that might interest you, however since I know this phone lags a lot, I rather keep the memory consumption as low as possible. If you are a hardcore social networking nerds, don’t ever dream to find any apps to suit your need. What you can do is, having  bookmarks saved into your phone to get connected to their mobile sites.

yeay..games!!!

other games stored in this phone...you can find this by browsing the My Files folder

I would love to see more apps developed for this phone but then again, considering that it does not have much dedicated application memory, I guess, this will be the end of this phone. But hey, this is not a smartphone, so maybe I should not really argue on this matter. There are still end users who actually don’t need apps to be installed on their phones. With all due respect, you can ignore my statements I made above.

4: Multimedia

Now this is the part where the party actually started. 1st of all, lemme refresh you once again, that this phone has a widescreen, 5mp camera, Dolby Digital whatever-whatever Sound System and most importantly a LARGE BEAUTIFUL SCREEN. Well, you cant compare TFT to a Super AMOLED screen that Samsung Galaxy S had, but with a low budget phone like LB40, you can get almost exact experience like using a high end phones. Lets dive in detail after the break!

a scene from Avatar

Movies:

When the 1st time you buy this phone, it already has the Avatar (mp4 format) trailer stored in the phone memory. The movie quality is SUPERB and I really amazed by this feature. The images are crisp and you wont believe that you are actually watching it on a phone. Well maybe I over exaggerated it, but really, I do respect LG for being able to make a phone with magnificent viewing experience. I did try to convert a movie on my own  but so far I still cant find the best software which can render a movie’s resolution similar to the screen. I bet if I can find one, I would be really happy to watch any movies while I’m on-the-go.

Musics:

The sound quality is excellent as well. I use my Creative earplugs when I’m listening to songs and I’m really satisfied with the performance. There is an option for Equalizer and it is here where you can enable the Dolby for Mobile. When I select this option, I can experience the best musics out there on this phone. I like to have loud bass and drums while listening to songs  and on this phone, I never failed to do so. It also have a standard disc-flow (or cover-flow as the Apple people calls it) to navigate songs and you can view the Music apps in both landscape and portrait view.

list of tracks in my phone

i said disc flow because i see discs..lmao

Camera:

It is stated from the specs you gonna get a 5mp Schneider-Kreuznach lens but don’t really hope that the photos taken are gonna be pleasant to your eyes. IMHO, no matter what lens you throw onto a phone, there is still no match for SonyE camera phones (even a 1.3 mp camera) in terms of photo quality. It is true that BL40 has more than a basic function of a phone (which are ISO setting, different shooting modes, exposure etc…) but still the photos are so-so. Well, given that under good lighting condition, and a perfect angle, you might get good shots (in fact, I can get the same quality photos on my Curve 8900 under good settings as well). My point of telling you this is, don’t judge a dumbphone by its camera. It is because, you will not be satisfied with the outcomes. The photos are acceptable given that you need to take shots of a note (like I always do), but it is not even close to be a digicam replacement.

the camera screen

If you switch to the videocam mode, it will shoot in 3gp mode. Also not that, it has a front facing camera for video calls which can also take photos. But the quality is even worse. When you are viewing photos on the phone, you can zoom in by using the pinch-to-zoom features like any smartphones adopts nowadays. The screen being relatively big, also has multi-touch features and so far, I can only use this while browsing and zooming photos.

viewing the photo album

zooming in to have a clear view

5: Connectivity

In a glance, this phone is a 3G capable phone which also supports for EDGE. So far, I’ve been using EDGE while browsing and when at home I connect it to the WiFi. For a dumbphone, it has a good native web browser (even better compared to that of Blackberry) and can render page pretty fast even on EDGE. But so far,I only use the browser to check Facebook and Twitter. All in all, this phone is an excellent device to browse the internet when you are waiting or having another attack of insomnia.

The browser as I mentioned above, is an excellent one among all dumbphones. It can render pages really well and also support for multi-window browsing. But having said that, don’t hope to view YouTube on this phone because Flash is not supported.

the browser in action!

lets turn it sideways for a better viewing shall we?

woah...multi screen for browsing? sweet~~

the browsing history screen..pretty cool huh?

6: Performance

Please have in mind that I’m an avid smartphone user. I have been changing smartphones because one reason, that is SPEED. And thus, having said that, I don’t think people like me would use this phone because it lags most of the time. When I do stuffs on this phone I want it to be quick and swift. From the moment I swiped my fingers on the screen until to the part where I type messages, I want everything to be seamless. But this phone is not my cup of tea. For an average phone users who have lots of patience, maybe they can find this phone to be the best, but not me.

Interestingly, when it comes to movies and musics, the phone wont lag at all. I think maybe this phone is targeting users who seeks enhanced multimedia experience. And if you are one of them, maybe this phone is the best for you. Sometimes, when you run too much apps, the phone will tend to freeze and an error message will pop up.

Surprisingly, even without much RAM and processing speed, this phone does have multi-task feature. You wont find this on any other dumbphones. For this reason, I should give LG a standing ovation for having an effort to incorporate this function. But personally, I seldom multi-task on this phone.

7: Conclusion

Rich in multimedia features but so-so in productivity. A good messaging device for all but not so for a power user. If you want a phone with a good reception and calling quality with enhanced multimedia and wanna look updated…BL40 might be your best Christmas present. The overall look makes it look a very trendy phone especially for girls. I personally feel that this phone is only for an eye candy. But to each its own and the beauty lies on the beholder. One might find it pleasant while others might just wanna trade in for another phone. I wont stick to this phone long enough to be my main communicating device. Until the right moment comes, I will obviously switch to an Android phone soon.

(p/s: those who are interested to buy this phone, lemme know…I can sell this 50% off )

That’s all for now..bye! ^^