As with LG's other touchscreen mobiles, the Chocolate runs the company's S-Class user interface. It's bright and colourful, with well-designed icons and some slick animations, including a funky rotating 3D cube that you can use to swap between different menu screens. But it can also be rather confusing to use because it gives you too many ways of accomplishing the same task. For example, applications can be accessed either via a shortcut menu, a grid display with icons divided into carousel menus based on their function, or in a landscape view that shows all icons on a single screen. After a while, we found ourselves craving the iPhone's simpler homescreen.
Despite LG having switched from the AMD chip it used in the Arena to a faster Qualcomm processor, the Chocolate still feels slightly sluggish, and can be slow to respond to screen taps. Also, we aren't all that keen on either of the text-entry options. In portrait mode, you're presented with a standard mobile-phone keypad with multiple letters per key. In landscape mode, the full Qwerty keyboard layout is rather cramped, so we often ended up hitting the wrong key. Matters are made worse by the fact that the predictive text system isn't as good as that of the iPhone or Hero. Suggestions don't seem as accurate or varied. The phone's also missing a few tricks, like that of double tapping the spacebar on the iPhone to enter a full stop and space at the end of a sentence.
In other areas, LG has made some welcome improvements to the S-Class experience. As well as supporting multi-touch zooming in the Web browser and picture viewer, you can now also double tap on an picture or column of text in the impressive Web browser to automatically zoom in on it. The Cover Flow-style mode in the photo and video browser has also been improved, giving you a clearer view of the thumbnails you're browsing through. Thanks to the new processor, there's no longer a delay between loading a picture and being able to zoom in on it, as there is on the Arena. There'll also be an iPhone-style, one-touch cut-and-paste system, although this wasn't functional on the early version of the phone that we had in for review.
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