LG KG800 review

Matthew Haigh

The touch sensitive front panel is almost too good; it takes some practice to confidently use it without accidentally activating features you didn't want

The LG KG800 - aka the Chocolate - is undeniably a beautiful piece of industrial design - but is it any good as a mobile phone?

The LG KG800 (Chocolate) phone is seductively styled; with its high gloss finish it just begs to be picked up and to have fingers run over its smooth surfaces.

Below the bright, richly coloured screen, the perfectly flat keypad emits a red glow, waiting for the lightest of touches to bring the phone to life. The slide out numeric keypad has a more conventional feel, with alternate keys being shiny or dull to give a chequerboard effect. It's no wonder that this phone has become a style icon.

From a gadget point of view, it has a reasonable selection of the most important toys; bluetooth, a 1.3MP camera with LED flash, voice dialling, MP3 player, email client and Java for games.

The memory is only 128MB and cannot be extended with a memory card, which isn't ideal for a music playing phone – though you'll still fit a reasonable number of tracks on it if you are willing to compromise on the bitrate. The bundled headphones also aren't great, but it does come with a headphone adaptor cable which includes a standard 3.5mm socket in addition to media player remote controls, so you can plug in your own favourite earphones.

PC connectivity is taken care of with an included USB cable and software. The Chocolate can appear as a USB memory card to your PC, so copying music, pictures and video clips between the two is simple as long as you are comfortable moving files around on your computer. Setting up the software to backup your contacts to the PC is a little more difficult, but you don’t have to buy anything else.

The user interface of the phone can be a little complicated at times, with some items available in more than one place (e.g. video clips are under both Multimedia and My Stuff), whilst others aren't quite where you'd expect them.

GPRS settings are a good example of this; there are completely different settings pages for the web browser and the email client, which look as if they were designed by different companies not part of the same product.

The touch sensitive front panel is almost too good; it takes some practice to confidently use it without accidentally activating features you didn't want.

The Chocolate is a phone that does most things, but none of them particularly well. However, you won’t be buying it for the toys, you’ll be buying it for how it looks and feels.