Cellphone Review: LG Chocolate VX8500

I have had the LG Chocolate since it came out. Honestly, I wouldn't buy it again. It is more of a pain than anything. The only good part about the phone is that it looks cool. Here is a review of the negatives I have discovered over my time with this phone.

Touch Sensor
The touch keys may look neat, but they aren't worth the hassle. They sense heat and that is how they function. This is a big pain. They allow you to set different settings on the phone on how sensitive the keys are. There is really no medium to this, and that is what the problem is. It's either ultra sensitive and skips through pages with just one touch of a button, or it's set at the lower sensitivity settings and takes pressing the button three or four times before it actually recognizes it. If they had a medium on this phone for setting the sensor and could actually make it so that it was like a real push button, this feature might be cool. Otherwise, is it really much harder to press a button than to touch the sensor? No, and in reality, the button is more basic and a lot easier.

MP3 Player
The MP3 player on this phone is actually kind of cool, but it takes a lot of getting used to in order to get it down. The phone allows you to add a storage card, which you can transfer your music from your computer to the memory card in order to get the music on your phone. One of the biggest downfalls of the mp3 portion of this phone is that the plug in requires an adapter if you want to use your own headphones. Otherwise, they expect you to buy a $50 package so that you can use a special set of headphones with it. The adapter isn't all that stable either. You plug it in, then plug your own headphones into the adapter and shortly after if you're not extremely careful, the adapter ends up falling out. They could have made a standard plugin for headphones, but they didn't. Most people like to have the choice on what headphones they plug into their mp3 player.

Keypad
The keys on the keypad which aren't touch sensor buttons are extremely close together. Even if you have small hands, while dialing a number you can easily mess up. While on most phones the numbers are semi separated, on the Chocolate you will see that the keys are directly next to each other. This makes it difficult to press the right buttons.

Other than these things, the phone is pretty basic. There is nothing special about it and it has been quite a hassle. I wouldn't recommend this phone to anyone, especially at the cost they sell it for. You can find better phones for your money, just make sure to shop around before coming to a decision.