Why you can trust TechRadar We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you’re buying the best. Find out more about how we test.
Battery life on the LG BL40 Chocolate is sadly very poor. The screen might look very pretty, but it must absolutely drain the power source, and these days 1000mAh batteries aren't big enough for this kind of device.
Using the internet on and off for an hour drained the battery down one bar, having the Push Email running in the background did the lifetime of a single charge no favours, and the video player really ate into the power too.
It seems that to fit everything into such a slim frame, LG had to decide what to shave off, and power management must have been high on that list. It's not a twice-a-day charge job or anything, but it came close on occasion for us during our time with it, and that's us only having it for a week.
There are ways of helping it out, such as turning off auto-brightness and sliding the brightness of the LG BL40 Chocolate right down (it's not that bad). Colours might not look as vivid, but at least you'll still be able to call people.
The Utilities section of the phone is as well stocked as you'd expect from a feature phone such as the LG BL40 Chocolate, with things like memos, calendar, multiple alarms and world clock all in attendance. Other than that, the calculator, timer and stopwatch all do exactly what they promise to do and not a lot more.
The LG BL40 Chocolate is well stocked when it comes to connectivity, and brings a few things you might not expect.
Of course there's the normal range of options, Bluetooth with A2DP 2.1, Wi-Fi connectivity, 3.5G HSDPA. We were also very pleasantly surprised to find an FM transmitter on board as well, meaning you can pump your tunes or add in some real time surround sound to your videos if you've got speakers hooked up to a radio.
The GPS chip, ably helped by a little aGPS number, works well, as we mentioned before. It starts up quickly and integrates well into the applications on board (WisePilot and Google Maps) with a good strength of connectivity holding on even in covered portions of the outdoors.
DLNA is also covered by the LG BL40 Chocolate, so if you've got yourself a home media network you'll be able to both discover and share media across it, although this can be a little bit tricky to set up. Our tip - make sure you've got the latest version of Windows Media Player running on a PC somewhere and you've set to allow sharing in the options panel.
See all LG BL40 Chocolate deals:
All deals | Pay monthly | Pay as you Go | SIM free
