LG BL40 Chocolate preview

The LG Black Label series has spawned some very successful handsets, but the BL40 is arguably one of the most dynamic, if only in aesthetic terms. It’s a long, thin phone that looks rather odd when you first clap your eyes on it, as if it’s been stretched the wrong way a few too many times on Photoshop and has somehow stuck that way.

Thankfully, in the flesh it all makes a lot more sense. Yes, it’s long and not very wide, but it’s also a lot less unwieldy than the Toshiba TG01, which technically has a similar sized screen at 4-inches – in reality it’s all quite different though.

Using a capacitive touchscreen, navigating around the S-Class style interface, which we’ve seen on a handful of LG handsets including the Arena and Crystal, was simple. There has however been made a few tweaks made especially for the BL40 – and surprisingly some are actually quite neat.

Our favourite was the ability to split the screen when browsing emails or text messages while the BL40 is held horizontally. This lets you view a list of messages on the left hand-side while actually reading one of them on the right. It’s a simple addition, but great for trawling through an inbox rather than just checking out your latest messages.

Unfortunately, the screen’s unique approach to stretching to a grand 4-inches isn’t quite as successful elsewhere. LG was keen to stress how great the BL40 is for watching videos, and yes, the screen’s bright and the colours were sufficiently vivid. However, unless you’re watching vids ripped straight off cinemascope, the aspect ratio’s going to give you less of an image rather than more of it.

The 21:9 screen is just a shade off what you’d get in the cinema’s most widescreen of movies, where most DVDs and televisions are geared towards a significantly less wide 16:9 format. Sadly, the sorts of videos we’d imagine you’d want to actually watch on the go, like TV episodes and YouTube clips, will almost never be the right proportions to make the most of the screen.

One test the BL40 did manage to pass though was that of pocketability. For all its strange girth, the BL40 fits very comfortably into the pocket of a common-or-garden pair of jeans, with no edges poking out either. It’s also fairly slim at 10.9mm thick, making the phone significantly slimmer than an iPhone.

We can’t imagine the BL40 would give you many portability issues unless you have very shallow pockets. Mind you, fashionable types that may have their heads turned by the BL40’s odd proportions might well have garments sporting such limited storage space.

Aside from these BL40-specific features and issues, the intuitive S-Class interface functioned just as we’ve become accustomed to. So, there are home screens and a couple of simple menu screens that lay out the phone’s functions as icons.

These icons can simply be dragged off the menu screens to make them appear on the home screen. The OS’s music player screen has been dropped in favour of a web shortcuts screen, but it’s no major change when the dedicated music player works just fine.

The music library we got to check out within the music player was a little too small to show off its capabilities but it makes good use of the screen, much like the email split screen function, letting you browse through albums and then the tracks within an album without changing your view.

As you might imagine, the wide screen comes in pretty handy when reading web pages too, although of course it’s dampened a bit by the fact you’ll still be scrolling an awful lot.

A little like LG’s Crystal handset, the BL40 is a very solid proposition considering at first it seems like it’s putting its eggs into a worryingly flimsy ‘style’ basket. We’ll be checking out features like the camera when we get to review the device, but our initial impressions were unexpectedly reassuring.