Review: LG Chocolate
Clock
Although the default clock on the home screen is easily viewable, a much larger digital readout can be selected to make it even more obvious. Other choices such as an analog mode or dual time zone display are also available, but not nearly as clear.
Checking the time when the phone is closed and the display is off is as simple as a quick press on the voice dial button. Or, if you'd like to show off, slide the Chocolate open to turn everything on and garner some attention while you check the time.
Bluetooth
Pairing with and using a Bluetooth headset and Bluetooth stereo headphones worked flawlessly. When we connected with our stereo headphones, the Chocolate automatically knew to make that our headset too. It connected to our headset instantly and consistently every time we tried to use it.
Our Bluetooth experience outside of headset usage was disappointing. The Chocolate cannot send any files by Bluetooth, and can only receive contact vCards. However upon receiving a vCard, the Chocolate mangles it when importing it into the phone book. It was enough effort to correct the mistakes, that we found it easier to just enter contacts by hand rather than correct the errors necessary to make our contacts searchable and usable.
Previous LG phones from Verizon have not demonstrated this problem, so it's clear that this was overlooked when fine tuning the software on the Chocolate.
Other
The Chocolate comes with the usual helpful suspects: an alarm clock, calculator and more - all buried in the Settings menu, of all places. The alarm is easy to set but only works if the phone is on.
You can still load Verizon's music player with Windows Media files using their PC software, but the new version adds support for MP3s, which you can copy to the card with any card reader. Unlike many other CDMA phones with MP3 players, the Chocolate will read the ID3 tags and allow you to sort MP3s or Windows Media files by artist or album. However the player only gets the song title correct for Windows Media files. For MP3s, it uses the file name as the title.