LG BL40 Chocolate review

Calling friends on the LG BL40 Chocolate is a much more pleasant experience than before; with the length of the phone raising call quality somewhat.

The phone dialler has the older version of smart dial, where it will recognise the number coming up and offer phonebook options containing that combination. That's an OK option, but when we've seen the likes of the Nokia E52 bringing the name up based on the predictive text combination of the keys, we're a little nonplussed by this method now.

With the lack of dedicated call/terminate keys, the phone dialler is an odd experience, with virtual keys needed to be pressed to bring up things like the call history.

A nice touch on the LG BL40 Chocolate is the fact you can view the call history of a given contact within that person's entry - icons at the top let you choose between the two.

Network coverage was pretty good on the LG BL40 Chocolate too. It may have struggled to regain signal when on the train, moving in and out of coverage, but on the whole it's pretty good.

As we mentioned above, the contacts list has been nicely enriched to allow you to see all the conversations between you and your friends from the contact listing, as well as being able to make them your favourites and add them to the home screen.

When doing so, they can either be arranged in a grid or a scroll wheel - once again the improved touch interface makes this a whole lot nicer to use, with a greater degree of ease when spinning it to get to your favourite.

From the favourites menu you can access the basic functions you need when calling - ie voice and video, editing and so on. The same things are available from the main listing too, but with more settings to play with, such as moving the storage location.

When searching for a contact from the list, you can either scroll through manually, use the side tab to move or enter the friend's name into the search bar. Annoyingly the virtual keypad is shown automatically, so 99 per cent of the time you'll have to shut this down before you can properly use the contacts menu.

Video calling is nothing exciting, and we doubt it's going to be a huge application for the LG BL40 Chocolate. You get to see your face and the other person's in quite good detail, as you'd expect from such a massive screen, but the quality's not too great throughout the call and the speakerphone is a bit too tinny for our liking.

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