Hi! Today, we’re taking a closer look at an old, trendy handset, the LG New Chocolate BL20. Having introduced the new Black Label Series star by telling you of the LG New Chocolate BL40, we now have the chance to take a closer look at the apparent to all famous Chocolate.
Naturally, it’s aimed to the fashion savvy people on the look out for a stylish eye-catching design rather than uncompromising functionality.
The new Chocolate BL20 is remarkable for its sharp, lean body coming in a color that never goes out of fashion, jet-black. It brings out the red numeric keypad, upper and lower parts of the handset. And they all create an eye-catching design blend and that will inevitably draw the attention in your direction.
The metal framing on the right and left does blend beauty to the overall design. Keep in mind, the retail units will come with slightly rounded, smoother edges and identical software. The TFT screen measures 2.4-inches. It has a native resolution of 240x320pixels and delivers top notched image quality. Our only grip relates to its lot of fingerprints and you will have to foam all cover in them in seconds which basically means regular cleaning.
The touch sensitive buttons typical of Chocolate handsets are below the screen. They featured great touch sensitivity and have a red back light much in harmony with the overall color solution. Fortunately, there is enough room in between them, so don’t worry about incidentally pressing adjacent buttons.
The key that calls up the multi-tasking menu is in the lower left corner while the widget button is in the lower right one. The slider mechanism is really tight and will light out but it tends to give over a slightly unpleasant sound when being opened. The numeric keypad is extremely handy and we have to say that dialing numbers and typing away is pure joy.
The interesting thing about the new Chocolate is that the volume rocker is also touch sensitive. Getting your press registered means you need to exert certain pressure but this is good. Since otherwise, it would have been really easy to touch by mistake.
Of a standard Micro USB port is on the left hand side. The screen lock on top and you can relish the beauty of the 5MP Schneider-Kreuznach camera with LED flash. If we take a look at the back of the handset, the LG new Chocolate BL20 stays true to its name and would look out of place in the company of handset with even fussiest design.
We think LG has done a great job in coming up with a proper edition to the series. It goes the BL20 is a handset with uncomplicated yet expressive design. Although, the interface is not of crucial importance for a phone like this, the BL20 covers the—on the phone functions.
The novelty feature here is called Photo memo. That will allow you to save any text, be it printed or hand written in a readable form. All you need to do is take a picture of it then the phone will process the image so as to make the background white and the text itself black. As a whole, we can’t say the function works properly.
Of course, you’ve got Calendar and other organizer functions. And the fast menu makes for a really handy option because it hosts shortcuts of your own choosing. There are all in all six widgets, Alarm, Note, Calendar, VIP Contacts, Weather and RSS. And being able to call them up from every screen with a dedicated widget button is a nice extra feature.
As we mentioned, the new Chocolate BL20 is equipped with a 5MP camera with LED flash Schneider-Kreuznach optics and auto-focus. In unson, with all the other physical buttons of the BL20, the camera shutter has no perceptible travel. It is not hard to get use to and you will feel at home using it after several attempts.
Pictures however, are of major quality. If an image is taken in broad daylight, lucky enough details. Colors look realistic indeed but as a whole, the result is far from what this five megapixel cameras deliver.
We’re even more disappointed at the video capture capabilities. We can not say we are please at the multimedia performance of the phone either. The handset manages to play MPEG4 content only at a maximum resolution of 320x240pixels.
We noticed skipped frames and this really ruined even the limited amount of pleasure we got off from watching videos. The MP3 player has a pleasing interface that visualizes album art properly and it comes with several equalizer presets that improved the audio playback.
If you’re intended to using the BL20 for business calls, you better give it up. The voices of people on the other end are drawn out by environmental noise and then—and indistinct. It’s really hard to catch onto it. The sound on the other end even a bit sharp is much clearer.
Given the audience, the LG new Chocolate BL20’s aimed at, we can’t really come down hard on the device for most of its flaws. In terms of technology, the BL20 isn’t anything special but it’s an awesome fashion accessory.
Well, we’re willing to show some lenience and disregard most of its flaws. There is a single aspect that we just cannot put up with and the ultimately prevents us from being able to recommend the handset, the low in call quality.
This is extremely important, even more so in the case of a cellphone that is not good at many things. The Samsung Ultra S that performs much better in almost every respect is a decent alternative and so with the LG Crystal GD900 is. It comes with a fussier design, three-inch display and transparent keyboards that is certain to attract attention and make people glance, if not at you, then at least at your handset.
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