Phone Is Off-Key as Music Player
Sweet?
The new LG Chocolate cellphone, which went on sale at Verizon Wireless outlets this week, is a dark confection of industrial design.
True to its function as a music and video player as well as a phone, it looks at first glance like an iPod, but sexier. It’s housed in a sleek, reflective black case with understated logos and no visible buttons. Only when its back panel is slipped down, revealing a keypad, is it apparent that it’s also a phone.
True to its name, this is a device that has taste.
Now, if only it worked better.
Not that it’s lacking in all ways. The Chocolate is a fine instrument for making and receiving calls, except that it doesn’t have a speakerphone function. (This can be deadly while you’re on hold with any customer service line telling you that your call is “very important to us”).
The phone keypad might be small, but the keys have a nice feel to them, complete with satisfying click, that makes it easy to input numbers and text messages.
And at a base price of $150 -- if bought with a two-year Verizon contract -- it costs less than ugly phones that are less of a pleasure to use.
But it falls short as a music and video player. It is too highly designed, too dependent on form rather than function for its own good. It follows in an unfortunate tradition of phone-player combo devices that underwhelm.
The Chocolate is all the more disappointing because of its beauty. You get the feeling that after designers, fabricators, colorists and calligraphers all had their way with the Chocolate, engineers were the last to be consulted.
After all, phones and hand-held music players are usually made to be operated on the run, under a wide range of conditions. Even with slightly dirty hands.
But not, it seems, our precious little Chocolate. Here are instructions from the manual about using the “touch buttons” on the side of the device that control volume and other functions: “Make sure your hands are clean and dry. Remove moisture from the surface of your hands. Don’t use the touch buttons in a humid environment.”
Right. I’ll be sure to use it only in a nuclear clean room.
If only the player’s controls were designed as well as the phone’s keypad, it would be far easier to use.
The controls on the Chocolate’s player functions, however, are touch rather than push buttons. They incorporate fiber optics and other technologies to make them highly sensitive. Even at the lowest sensitivity setting, it’s easy to slightly brush across one of these buttons, sending you into unknown territory.
For example, on several occasions I accidentally hit something on the left front of the Chocolate that put a calendar on the screen. When I tried to get into that calendar function, I couldn’t. It remains a mystery.
Sometimes just picking up the device, without touching a button, triggered a player function of one type or another.
This sensitivity might be what led the designers of the device to build in several fail-safes. For example, consider the Unlock button on the side, which allows access to the controls. When you press it, you will usually get a screen message saying the button has to be pressed a second time. Likewise the Music button.
Maybe I’d get used to this after a while, but it drove me nuts during the several days I tested the Chocolate. It was as if it was constantly doubting me. “Are you really, really sure you want to use the phone?” “Do you definitely want to play music right now?”
Perhaps I shy from commitment, but this was too Dr. Phil for me.
Once you get to the player functions, the available music cuts are laid out in long lists that are a chore to organize. It took several touches just to choose a song and get it to play.
On the upside, once you get a song going, the sound fidelity is very good.
But there are other frustrations. The base price does not provide the essentials for playing music. It costs an additional $50 to get a kit that includes a cable for uploading music from a computer and a stereo headset, which serves double duty with a built-in microphone for making phone calls.
For music listening you can use your own headset, which is fortunate because the ear buds on the Verizon models are too big to provide a comfortable fit for many people, including me.
The Chocolate comes with enough internal memory to store a few songs, but to hold more you’ll need to buy the optional 2-gigabyte storage card that slips into the phone. That’s another $50.
Along with debuting the Chocolate, Verizon announced a welcome development concerning its multimedia VCast service, which is used to access music and video over the cellular network.
The company has eliminated the $15 monthly subscription fee it was charging to use VCast for music. Buying music directly by phone on the service is still relatively expensive, however, at $1.99 a song.
To avoid that cost, Chocolate users can upload their own MP3 music files from their computers to the phones. This music can be either from CDs or from online stores that use Microsoft’s digital rights management regimen. (Songs bought from the leading online music store, Apple’s iTunes, will not work, however).
So the quest for the great phone-player combo, which can play tunes between calls, goes on.
The Chocolate can do it and look great at the same time. But it may be more at home in a design museum than a backpack.
David Colker can be reached at technopolis@latimes.com. Previous columns can be found at latimes.com/technopolis.
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Sweet and sour
The LG Chocolate cellphone is beautiful to look at, but its music and video player is difficult to use.
Distributor: Verizon Wireless
Price: $149.99 for basic phone (with two-year service contract). With a music essentials kit that includes a headset and a computer cable, the price rises to $199.99. Add a 2-gigabyte memory card for storing music and the price comes to $249.99.
Pros: Eye-catching design; phone functions well.
Cons: The touch buttons on the music player are overly sensitive, and the music organizing software is not user-friendly.
Los Angeles Times
