LG New Chocolate Slide review: LG New Chocolate Slide

Design

LG sure has a knack for silly names and beautiful phones, and the New Chocolate Slide is both. The design intimately resembles the original LG Chocolate, with its glossy black exterior and glowing red touch-sensitive navigation keys. The New Chocolate is more refined, however; gone is the square metal border around the five-way nav-key, and the New Chocolate has a flat top and bottom with a sexy metallic-red trim.

6.9

LG New Chocolate Slide

The Good

Mouth-watering design. Good mobile web browser. Bright, colour display.

The Bad

Super-sensitive touch controls. Telstra ads replace pre-installed apps. No 3.5mm headphone socket. Expandable memory not included.

The Bottom Line

The Slide's good looks may fool you into thinking it's more capable than it actually is. Under the sleek exterior the New Chocolate Slide is relatively feature poor, but what it does do, it does well.

Sliding the New Chocolate open is smooth as butter and the phone snaps firmly in place revealing a flat numeric keypad. Again this keypad is more attractive in its design than the original, with a similar metallic-red hue as the trim around the exterior, but the flat design isn't the best for fast text input. The back of the phone houses a 5-megapixel camera lens and, from our experience, the bulk of our smudgy fingerprints.

The phone charges using micro-USB and the New Chocolate shares this port with its bundled stereo headphones. The New Chocolate is compatible with microSD memory cards though none were included with our review unit. There's a second, front-facing video camera for 3G video-calling above the handset's bright, colourful 2.4-inch display. We love this screen; the colours are rich and bright and LG has included a few animated wallpapers to give your home screen a bit of movement.

While we love the phone's aesthetic, we have become increasingly frustrated with the touch-sensitive navigation panel. Unlike some touchscreens we've reviewed, this panel is too responsive and too often we found that we would accidentally select an option, like the shortcuts menu, when trying to move the cursor around the screen. There doesn't seem to be anyway to adjust the sensitivity of these buttons, so those who choose the New Chocolate Slide will just have to learn to touch with care.

Features

At first blush the sleek design might suggest that the Slide is a high-tech gadget with the same features as one of LG's many smartphones. Don't be fooled, the Slide is actually quite a simple device. It features high-speed web access, the aforementioned camera and a basic media player, but that's about it. In fact, there's quite a bit of hardware here and not a lot of software — it's like someone giving you the keys to a car but no car.

In fact, something that we found particularly disheartening when using the New Chocolate Slide, was that absolutely every folder that would otherwise house applications is instead home to a web link directing the browser to one of BigPond's countless web portals urging you to buy apps. You want to play a game? Give us your credit card number. Want an instant messaging client? Show us the money first. Telstra's stripping phones of apps and filling them with links is vulgar and robs customers of functionality that we now expect to be included.

Still, the basics are here and for the most part they are quite good. The web browser is one of the better mobile browsers we've encountered with fast page navigation on simple sites. The media players do the trick, though more memory and a 3.5mm headphone socket would improve the experience substantially. Social networking is just barely covered, and not with fast, stand-alone apps but with more Telstra web links.

Performance

While we were disappointed with the lack of applications beyond the basics, we did love the speed of the New Chocolate Slide. The general performance of the Slide matches its sports car-like exterior with zippy menu navigation and quick loading times for the available tools and apps. The settings menu is too convoluted for users wanting to do more than just change their wallpapers, but customers who have their phone set up at the store won't have to worry about this.

The 5-megapixel camera is middle of the road in regards to both operation and photo quality. Taking a pic with this camera takes about 2.5 seconds, which includes the amount of time it took to pre-focus and that time split evenly between the lens focusing and the image processing. This certainly isn't the best tool for shooting fast-moving subjects like young children or pets. The images we've taken with the New Chocolate Slide are about average for a camera phone, the colour is bright and warm, but the auto-focus struggles to keep the images sharp.

Call quality and network reception has been good during our tests, though the earpiece speaker is a little quiet. LG has replaced depressible volume keys with touch-sensitive ones which, to save you accidentally adjusting the volume, you have to unlock the screen to use. This is cumbersome and had us nostalgic for the good old days when things were simpler and buttons were pushier.

Overall

Though we complain about the absence of Facebook or a pre-installed game to play on the train, the LG New Chocolate Slide will fit the bill for a good many people. It makes calls and sends messages with ease, the camera is passable, the smooth menu navigation is a pleasure to use, and it looks fantastic doing it. Next to your run-of-the-mill Nokia 6000 series or Samsung mid-range, this LG phone's stunning good looks could be the deciding vote, just don't expect to find hidden tech treats in the sub-menus, those folders are reserved for Telstra advertisements.