LG BL40 Chocolate Review

The LG Chocolate BL40 is unlike any other touchscreen phone we've come across. Its stunning, ultra-wide display has a true cinematic 21:9 aspect ratio and gives the handset a very distinct tall-and-thin profile. Available in October for free on a £35-per-month contract with Orange or Carphone Warehouse, or for £500 SIM-free, the Chocolate is quite pricey. Besides the impressive screen, though, it's bursting with other cool features, including a 5-megapixel camera, FM transmitter and DivX support.

Quite the looker
Unlike LG's previous touchscreen handsets, such as the chunky Arena KM900 and boxy Viewty Smart GC900, the Chocolate is a real looker. It's not just the fact that its tall and narrow form factor separates it from the rest of the smart-phone pack. LG has packaged it in an extremely slim and neat piano-black chassis that really looks the business. Before getting our mitts on a review sample, we thought the phone would be too tall and ungainly, but it actually feels very comfortable in the hand, partly because it's narrower than other smart phones.

Stunning screen
This handset's key feature is its fantastic 102mm (4-inch) capacitive touchscreen. Like the phone itself, the display is tall and narrow. In fact, it's got a 21:9 aspect ratio, so it can show a full cinematic image without having to crop the edges, as the iPhone or HTC Hero do. When working in landscape mode, this means the screen is considerably wider than it is tall. That turns out to be both a blessing and curse.

It's a blessing for a number of reasons. Firstly, the extra width means you can view movies in their natural 21:9 aspect ratio, with the result that they look absolutely brilliant, especially as the display is very bright and has a reasonably high resolution of 800x345 pixels. The extra width has also allowed LG to introduce a neat split-screen view in the messaging applications: contacts are listed on the left-hand side, with messages appearing on the right, just like with standard PC applications. It also means Web pages fit across the screen without you having to scroll back and forth, as you must with pretty much every other smart phone around.

The downsides are that, as the display is also very narrow, when you do view Web pages in landscape mode, the rendered text is very small and quite difficult to read. Consequently, you usually find yourself having to zoom in to increase the text size to a more acceptable level. This defeats the purpose of having the wider screen, as, once you zoom in, you then have to scroll back and forth, just as you do on other devices. Also, when you call up the landscape keyboard in the browser, email or SMS applications, it practically fills the entire screen, leaving just a couple of lines of text at the top. We can't help but feel that LG would have been better off making the screen slightly taller in landscape mode, even if this would have meant using a non-21:9 aspect ratio.

Lacklustre user interface
As with LG's other touchscreen mobiles, the Chocolate runs the company's S-Class user interface. It's bright and colourful, with well-designed icons and some slick animations, including a funky rotating 3D cube that you can use to swap between different menu screens. But it can also be rather confusing to use because it gives you too many ways of accomplishing the same task. For example, applications can be accessed either via a shortcut menu, a grid display with icons divided into carousel menus based on their function, or in a landscape view that shows all icons on a single screen. After a while, we found ourselves craving the iPhone's simpler homescreen.