This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of LG Chocolate Touch. All opinions are 100% mine.
Last week, I got an LG Chocolate Touch in the mail to review. You’ve probably seen a commercial for it featuring musical artist, Ciara. The commercials have really been pushing the sound quality of this phone, so I decided to make that the focus of my review while still touching on everything else you look at in a phone.
Sound Quality Worth Bragging About
Fresh out of the box, my objective was to get my own music onto the phone. I plugged it in and in no time, I was moving over music. With a microSD card, there was plenty of space, so I moved over a bunch of music to test with. Honestly, LG makes some nice hardware, but I didn’t expect a lot in the way of audio quality from a cell phone. Somehow, though, they managed to get really clean sound and despite my expectations, I could tell the difference in audio clarity between the Chocolate Touch and other phones. My iPhone, for example, has pretty good audio for listening to music through my headphones, but the music playing through my LG seemed to have more depth to it.
More Music Features
Like most music players, the one in the LG lets you poke around for an artist, album or track and has all the standard functions, but it goes beyond that. LG wants people to know this is a phone with music on its mind, so they included a Dolby Mobile equalizer with a handful of presets as well as the option of a manual equalizer. Choosing Bass Boost and then switching to Voice Boost, I could hear a clear change and Voice Boost made my first test song sound a lot better than without it. They also added Rhythmical Beat (the phone vibrates to the beat), Visual Effect (some nice background movement) and Join the Band. Join the Band is a pretty unique feature I haven’t seen before. You can choose between a drum set and a scrolling keyboard to play music along with the currently playing track. When I tried it, it didn’t sound too great because I can’t hold a beat, but if you’re more musically inclined, this is a cool way to remix while you listen. Either way, it was a lot of fun to play along and be a part of the music.
Your music can be managed, too. The added ability to create and manage music library and playlists is a nice step up from the standard player functionality. The Chocolate Touch also kept with the originality by adding an FM tuner with Verizon’s song identification software. I think more phones should offer this and was glad to see it included.
Touch Screen, Design, and Usability
Opening the box, I found a phone oozing style. The red pillow it was on felt like a red carpet. The phone, itself is incredibly good looking with various shaped buttons and a smoky-steel exterior. A little smaller than an iPhone, it feels comfortable in your hand and all the buttons are in convenient places. The back plate is an extension of the rock-star look LG was aiming for (and nailed). It looks like someone spilled gray paint on it, but in a good way, and just in case gray isn’t your color, they threw in a purple back plate as well. Finally, the thing is almost soft, which is kind of calming.
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(click here to see all the LG Chocolate Touch photos)
The touch screen required more force than I’m used to or would prefer to make anything happen. Re-calibrating seemed to help a little, but I still had to work just a little harder to select things. That said, the interface seems to be designed to minimize the amount of poking at the screen that would need to be done in order to get to what you want. Beneath the back plate and under the battery was the microSD. I prefer it in a more accessible location, but that’s at the risk of it popping out and getting lost.
This phone also comes with a 3.2 megapixel camera. The camera software is adaptive to the photo being taken and will adjust for too little or too much light. I liked that because I could get a photo of my monitor and it adjusted to be perfectly readable.
Conclusion
The LG Chocolate Touch is a wonderful touch screen phone with some incredible features if your music is important to you while on the go. Just the design and the music features would be enough to help me get used to the touch screen and for the price, it’s a really good alternative to other phones that are battling to unseat the iPhone.
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