LG New Chocolate BL40 Review

Interface, phone contacts and organizer:

The S-Class 3D interface the LG New Chocolate BL40 runs brings forth several new features alongside of the previous models utilizing the same software (LG ARENA, LG Crystal, LG Viewty Smart). We have already told you about the novelties in our preview of the New Chocolate BL40, but let´s go over them briefly. The home screen features four pages dedicated to Widgets, Contacts, Browser and Shortcuts, each doing what its name suggests.



The motley elements are also present in the main menu. It sports icons that are large enough, look great, are depicted in great details and come in any color imaginable – red, green, yellow, blue, violet and what have you – truly eye-catchy indeed. Everything in life comes at a price though and in this case you can see no more than three of them in each separate category with your phone in portrait mode, meaning operating the phone involves some extensive scrolling. The problem is as easy to deal with as turning the phone to landscape, which we cannot say feels exactly comfy. Still, if you feel like taking full advantage of the beautiful screen and use the phone in landscape mode, you can at least rest assured everything works just fine thanks to the snappy built-in accelerometer.



There is one major issue that plagues the interface of the LG New Chocolate BL40. It´s not been properly optimized, so everything runs slowly and the animated effects tend to stutter. Even uncomplicated actions like finding a contact entry can prove to be rather annoying, especially if you don’t have the patience of a saint. Don’t take this amiss, there´s nothing wrong with you, it´s… LG. Even typing letters in the search tab is really sluggish.



We faced the same problem when using the calendar. Everything seems just fine until you get round to creating an event. This involves some extensive scrolling - to pick the necessary start and end time, relevant date and location etc. We don´t really mean the application is totally unusable, but there is simply no way of getting this done quickly. You will have to patiently wait for the lagging and stuttering animation to end, put up with the inadvertent mistakes you will unavoidably make, courtesy of the inadequately operating interface, before eventually managing to create a calendar entry in under three to four minutes. Well, just don’t forget make sure everything has been entered properly and the date hasn’t jumped from 11th to 10th in the last second.



The LG New Chocolate BL40 delivers rich functionality to make your daily life easier. Let´s start with the alarm. “Great”, we told ourselves, “because our routine would come to standstill without proper alarm function!”, so we decided to take a closer look. You can set an alarm in three different ways – by turning the hour and minute hands manually, spinning rollers or using the numeric keypad. The most enjoying of them all is, of course, turning the clock hands yourself – the whole thing looks great and its interface is not lagging. You can set quick alarms in case you need a reminder that is to go off in a short time, i.e. less than an hour.

The other organizer functions include notes, world clock app that takes full advantage of the multitouch technology, voice notes etc.