LG Chocolate BL40 video hands-on

The LG Chocolate BL40 smart phone has just launched, so join us for a video tour around its rather glamorous features.

Let's start with the most noticeable aspect -- the screen. It's a 102mm (4-inch) touchscreen beast, and extra-wide to boot.

You can ignore LG's marketing nonsense about it being a high-definition screen, but videos certainly look good on it, despite the fact it's a normal LCD display rather than an OLED one.

LG has tinkered with the phone menus and apps to make sure they take full advantage of the width of the screen. You can fit more of a Web page on the display, for a start, so there's less scrolling from side to side.

Features such as email have a split screen, with the person's name on one side, and their emails on the other. Similarly, music artwork appears on the left in the MP3 player next to the track listing.

Size-wise, it's much smaller than we thought it was going to be from the early pictures -- it's thin and light enough to fit in your pocket, if a little longer than a normal phone.

There's a proper 3.5mm headphone jack at the top as well, so you can slide it into your pocket with your headphones connected without breaking anything.

There's a picture viewer, which looks an awful lot like Apple's Cover Flow, along with a panoramic shot mode. This automatically stitches together several shots from the 5-megapixel camera into one, ultra-long image.

The screen supports multitouch, so you can pinch to zoom into Web pages, and the browser supports Flash Lite. We're told this will mean you'll be able to watch TV from BBC iPlayer on the phone, although it didn't work on this pre-production sample.

There are also some relatively advanced video-editing features for a phone, including the ability to trim a clip and replace the soundtrack with a music file stored on the device.

It runs the latest version of LG's S-Class interface, which means it has an awful lot of features, and is customisable to the nth degree, but it can be very confusing and overwhelming. Just check out the number of shortcut icons on the phone in the video -- then go and read our full LG Chocolate BL40 review.

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• Tags:
• LG Electronics,
• BBC iPlayer,
• LG Chocolate,
• smart phone,
• megapixel camera