Review: Mobelux Awards
February 22, 2010Review: Mobelux Awards
Using Awards, you can track achievements for your children, staff and more. You begin by adding people from your Contacts list (which is handy, since it means its easy to issue awards to the email addresses on these entries), then go on to award gold stars. You can either add them manually or tap a task tidied room or handed work in ahead of deadline, for example. You can create your own tasks and assign them a star value, then add them to that persons history. Then you set appropriate rewards an hour of TV might be worth 5 stars which you can issue and redeem via email as pretty graphical certificates. Configuration can be a little tedious, however, and wed like to see some tie-in with a web service so that the people youre monitoring can see what rewards theyre eligible for.Related LinksTechRadar’s Reviews GuaranteeRead more iPhone app reviewsRelated StoriesReview: BirdhouseReview: Icon Factory Twitterific PremiumReview: Email ‘n WalkReview: Freeverse Postman
Review: Motorola Dext MB200
Motorola has been silent for a long time, but it has finally brought out the Dext the first phone in years that can be spoken of in the same breath as the Palm Pre and HTC Hero.We all marvelled at the Razr, which was so thin that we didn’t care there was a rubbish phone underneath. But then Motorola felt its laurels were pretty comfortable, so decided to have a little rest there.But now it’s back with Google Power, and the Dext Motorola’s first Android phone. It’s taken a leaf out of HTC’s book and seen what can be done when you fuse Android with a little extra in the case of the Dext it’s MotoBlur.Motorola is hoping this new social networking-friendly overlay will work wonders and see customers flocking back to the brand but is a bit of Facebook and Twitter enough?The Dext is a pretty big device, thanks to packing a full QWERTY keyboard and a 3.1-inch capacitive touchscreen. It feels like two phones merged together with a super thin iPhone-a-like on top with a chunky physical keyboard beneath.It’s similar in form factor to the HTC Touch Pro 2 rather than the T-Mobile G1, and the top portion is in an uncharacteristic move from Motorola poorly connected to the bottom, with a large amount of wiggle making the whole thing feel cheaper than it should.It’s a shame, as apart from being a little large, the Motorola Dext is a nice phone. It feels a little strange in the hand with its generous dimensions, and won’t be pocket-friendly if you’re into skinny jeans, but there’s a reason Motorola has made it in such a way.Apart from its large and responsive touchscreen, the inclusion of a full keyboard on the Dext gives users the choice of text input. The keys are well formed and rubberised, with a decent amount of travel and space around them.However we’ve given a few people the Dext to play with and the reviews of the keyboard have been mixed. Some liked it, but some said the keys were too squashed together vertically. Our own opinion is that this is a good keyboard, as we quickly got to grips with it and our accuracy was almost perfect within a day.We compared this to the likes of the N97 and the G1 no matter how much time we took to play with them there was always a degree of misspelling and you can see why we’re such fans.The layout of the phone is not so great though. The keyboard is decent enough, with an Alt and Shift key (two of the latter) giving easy access to a number of characters, but the other keys aren’t so ergonomically intuitive.The power / hold key is hidden between the two partitions on the upper right-hand side of the phone, and no matter how hard we tried, it wasn’t easy to hit. The camera button is in a similar place, and not only does it require a really hard press to start up, but it’s also in a slightly tricky-to-hit place.On the left-hand side is the silencer switch and the volume control, with the microUSB port at the bottom. The latter isn’t covered, so you’d best watch out you don’t pour dust in there or else charging the phone will be a nightmare.The 3.5mm headphone jack is almost ornately carved into the head of the Motorola Dext, with sweeping curves leading to the protruding port. It’s a little much, but at least you’ll always be able to find the socket in your pocket.The front of the phone hosts the three main buttons (no wealth of HTC-like keys here). It’s basically a menu key, home button and back key, with the search button put on the QWERTY keyboard (which we must say is a more sensible place for it on such a phone.There’s also an unobtrusive tiny white LED in the top left-hand corner, which blinks for notifications, and is just the right brightness to be visible without being annoying when you’re trying to ignore it on the desk.The rear of the phone has only two things the dappled cover and the 5MP camera (without flash). It’s easy to remove the cover to get to the battery (which has a pleasing old-school pull tab to remove the battery) and memory card.Both the SIM card and the microSD are locked in by weird rubberised gates we don’t know what’s wrong with a good old-fashioned push and click, but there you have it.It’s not the most aesthetically pleasing device, and the large amount of give between the top and the bottom of the Dext is very annoying, but it’s generally a well laid out phone and manages to stick a fair amount of keys and switches into a palm-sized device.The MotoBlur interface is basically the same as HTC’s Sense UI but taken in a different direction. Motorola took great pains to point out how very different it is to HTC’s effort at the launch, but in all honesty there’s only so many ways you can squeeze social networking onto an Android phone.The main crux of the device is ‘Happenings’, which is another dubious word for updates on Twitter and Facebook. Starting up the phone is a slightly convoluted process as it requires to you to not only set up a MotoBlur account, but also to login to Google, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace in order to access those accounts and integrate them with the phone.The Dext then takes you to the Android home screen, with the traditional background seen on the HTC Magic and G1 and the Samsung i7500 Galaxy.But there’s a difference not only do you get five home screens, but there are up and running widgets spewing information about your friend’s statuses from Twitter, MySpace and Facebook.Scroll around and there are news widgets, RSS feeds and tips and tricks to help you set up the phone. Tapping any of these will lead to a larger dialog box opening up, with a small green arrow taking you to the web version of any article or status.The touchscreen on the Motorola Dext is top notch, registering the faintest of flicks with ease Motorola has definitely vaulted into the upper echelons of touch responsiveness along with the Apple iPhone 3GS, Palm Pre and HTC Hero.This is a very important feature on the Dext, as so much of it is scrolling through items like statuses. The first problem we envisaged with MotoBlur is that having all your Twitter and Facebook accounts synchronised into one stream (the Happenings… which sounds like a rubbish pop-horror film) is that the amount of information from 200 friends and the hundreds of people you’re following on Twitter will result in an overload.Well, that was the case at the start, and we worry that some users might simply switch off the happenings widget, especially as the pictures taken from Twitter accounts to furnish the Tweet are of a horribly low resolution and are cropped badly it doesn’t look good.But take a couple of days to get used to it, and Happenings is a pretty good tool. It would be nice to have a dedicated Twitter client on the phone too (although you can download the likes of Twidroid from the Android Market), as in the HTC Hero, for more advanced Twitter functionality, but the Dext does let you update your status direct from the phone.In fact, you can update the status of one or multiple accounts at once, so if something vitally important has happened (like you’ve had a new brand of cereal that morning and simply MUST tell the world about it) you can Tweet it and use it as a status on MySpace and Facebook too.Some people might find that Twitter is just too constantly updated and will only want to see their friend’s status from Facebook you can select to see some, all or none of your social networking accounts through Happenings if you so wish.However, it would be nicer if you could have one widget for Twitter, one for Facebook and so on It’s just a bit much having them all in one place, even though it’s easy to get used to as we said.Also, we’d like to see an ‘all read’ label on Happenings it’s constantly telling us we have hundreds of unread statuses, but the reason we haven’t read them is because they were from hours or days ago.Locking the phone is once again a convoluted process we miss the simple ‘Menu, *’ options of old. While it’s nowhere near as bad as the Samsung i7500 Galaxy, the new phone needs you to hit the annoyingly placed power key and then tap the menu button for some reason we couldn’t get used to this and kept hitting the wrong options.Other than the widgets on offer, it’s standard Android fare, and it’s here that we feel Motorola has missed a trick. So much of consumer opinion is about perception, and MotoBlur needs to be seen as an evolution in Android. So why put the standard background on at the start?HTC managed to make some people think there was a new OS under the hood of the Hero, simply by inserting a new background to make the new widgets look even snazzier. Had Motorola done that, it would have made people realise MotoBlur is more than just a collection of widgets spitting information about their friends.But we can’t be angry at another phone using Android, especially as it adds something to the burgeoning OS. We’re happy to see the standard tools present once more pulling down from the top of the screen to access notifications about messages or USB connections or movement into roaming zones is still a great trick.As is grabbing the menu tab to open up the icon list, and holding said icons down to place them on the home screen. We also still love the fact that holding an icon opens up the deletion bin it just makes organising the home screens (and as we have five, they need even more upkeep) even easier.The accelerometer works well too we love those that can spin through 360 degrees for whichever way you want to hold up the phone, and the Dext does just that.However, open up a couple of applications (such as the music player) and the whole thing slows down a lot pressing buttons requires a couple of seconds waiting, in which time you’ve probably accidentally hit another icon.It’s a shame for a phone that promises a lot perhaps Motorola should have done better than the Qualcomm 528 MHz processor it stuck under the hood.The Motorola Dext might be a little bit too heavy when it comes to showing you information, but MotoBlur is something new and exciting for Android, and shows the power of the OS when the big names get developing for it.This is another aspect of the Motorola Dext that the brand has used MotoBlur to enhance. If you thought that Happenings was just a bunch of updates, think again, as Motorola wants synchronised contacts across the board.You can choose from a huge number of different contacts lists (available directly from the home screen), be it Facebook, Google or the MotoBlur option, which collates them all into one lovely contact book.We call it lovely because not only is it stored in one place, it’s also backed up to the online server, so should you lose your phone you don’t lose all your numbers too.It’s a bit strange to have this when you’ve got Google already doing roughly the same thing but we guess with MotoBlur you get that all important Facebook and Twitter information too.The cool thing about MotoBlur in contacts menu is that, like Synergy from Palm and INQ’s contacts system, users can link different profiles together under one name. However, the sad thing about this is you pretty much have to do it manually for every single person in our case the list ran to 1,000 people (we’re not that popular, it’s just what happens when you dump four different contact lists into one place).The Motorola Dext will synchronise Facebook if the email address is present and matches the contact, but apart from that it will just list every name, meaning users are forced to manually link all their contacts.And what’s odder is that the Dext doesn’t seem to be able to alphabetise the list properly it will list the imported SIM contacts first (as long as they’re not linked to another profile) and then move to the rest.Users can dynamically scroll through the list to see their contacts, or use the pull tab at the side to fly through the alphabetical list (as much as they can do with the aforementioned problem). The responsiveness of the touchscreen to the flick action is good, meaning you can clear a very long list in three swipes.Once the contacts are linked, there are a plethora of options available from that screen, and it’s here the MotoBlur system comes into its own. Users can see conversations they’ve had over Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or text, they can view phone calls between the two, send messages through a variety of mediums and see the updates from their friends too.Oh, and of course you can call as well… but that’s very 20th century.Actually, that does raise a problem with the Dext when it comes to calling you only need to touch a number in the contacts list to start calling. And the phone often decides you don’t need the screen when calling, for some reason automatically switching it off.And as there’s no physical terminate key, users will then do as we did and scramble around in a blind panic trying to get the screen to fire up again by pressing all manner of buttons and eventually heading back to the home screen all the while connecting (and likely confusing) someone on the other end of the phone.Mind you, call quality isn’t too bad, even if the phone is a little bit chunky to be holding to the head. Audio quality was acceptable, but there was some weird echo feedback from the microphone you can hear yourself speaking into the phone from the earpiece from some reason.It makes everything sound clearer, but it’s very disconcerting.Calling is made easy through the dialler, also living on the homescreen, which allows users to type in a number, see the most recent calls in and out the phone, see which numbers are dialled the most frequently (a really nice touch) and see speed dial numbers. The latter are essentially just a list of favourites categorised under a different name, but we like the variety Moto brings here.There’s sadly no smart dial on the dialler, but that doesn’t matter as users can instead pop open the QWERTY keypad and simply start typing in a name to access it. However, it’s a very slow process and seems to stump the Dext’s 528MHz processor for some reason.We like the MotoBlur system for organising contacts however, we also like the fact that HTC’s Sense UI will give us suggestions for people we may like to be our contacts on Facebook. Something needs to be done else Motorola will find many of their customers not taking the necessary day of work simply to spend hours linking contacts together.The Motorola Dext also brings combined messaging to the phone with MotoBlur, on top of the contacts synchronisation mentioned earlier.Users don’t just get a normal inbox when using the phone they see all messages stored in a universal inbox where Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, text messages and emails are all lumped together.From there users can reply in any way they want to, meaning if somebody sends you a Facebook message but you want to get hold of them quickly, a text or direct Tweet might work better and is within easy reach.However, the downside here is the same as in contacts if you haven’t spent hours linking the contacts together you just have to go through the normal channels of messaging, scrolling for a contact before sending the message. It’s no great hardship; it just takes the sheen off the experience a little bit.We’ve already spoken of our affection for the QWERTY keyboard, but when it comes to entering text the on screen version is equally as good.Accuracy is good, and the word prediction is as scarily good at selecting the word we’re after as the iPhone which is high praise indeed for such a feature. However, one problem is the build quality the mane flexes and wobbles badly under the finger when using the onscreen effort, which is most disconcerting.There’s a variety of messaging options on the phone beyond the MotoBlur and the Universal Inbox, with Google Mail making its usual appearance on the Dext. But users can also synchronise another account easily to the phone through the email function, and add in Exchange support through a corporate email server as well.It’s important to remember that underneath all of this MotoBlur excitement is Google Android pushing things along nicely with its 1.5 Cupcake version. Simple tricks like threaded conversations can be dressed up how you like by the different brands, but the fact is it’s easy to see what you’ve been saying with someone, and adding an item such as sound or a picture is only a couple of clicks through the menu system.The Motorola Dext is capable of many messaging options, and it’s a credit to the MotoBlur platform that you can interact with your friends so easily. We like being able to Facebook message our friends from the menu, but it’s been done by INQ on a 60 phone, so we’re not sure it’s that exciting a move any more.But social networking addicts will certainly love the feature, and Motorola has got it working well, so we have to commend the company for that.We’re sure Motorola would love to take credit for the browser functionality, but it’s very hard to see beyond the excellent Android browser.Internet browsing on the Android platform has always been one of the best mobile experiences on the market, and that is thankfully mimicked on the Motorola Dext.The springy and responsive screen lets you move web pages around as easily as if you were using a mouse, and the zooming in and out, admittedly not as good as multi-touch pinch and zoom, still works well.The internet on the Dext will give easy access to full HTML options, and the phone has a similar smart-fit ability to the HTC Hero, with text quickly resized at the correct column size even after zooming in heavily.There’s also an easy option to resize back to the normal zoom level thanks to the ‘1x’ virtual button in the bottom right hand corner, and the excellent mini-magnifier mode is there once more.The latter is a particularly cool function as it allows users to drag a little pane around a highly zoomed-out view of the web page to find the text you want, before automatically focusing back in on it.The Motorola Dext can also handle multiple web pages, with a nice animation for each change showing the new windows opening a new pane. These panes can be accessed through the menu button, giving users easy access to all the pages they currently have open.We had six open at once at one point, with no hint of slowdown if you’re only using the web browser start listening to some music, though, and things start to judder a bit.The Motorola Dext, through the Android 1.5 Cupcake update, also features intelligent bookmarking as well. When holding down the back key (for quite some time, it has to be noted) new tabs are brought up, with bookmarks, most visited and history all listed for your prodding pleasure.This screen can also be seen when heading through the bookmarks option, although it’s not a patch on the visual bookmarks from HTC on the Hero.Copy and paste is also supported, activated by opening the menu and choosing to select text. There’s no option to just hold down the screen to call up a menu to copy and paste, so you have to navigate through a series of menus. The accuracy isn’t the best at normal screen sizes, so if you really need some text then it’s best to zoom in heavily.There’s no Flash support, unlike the HTC Hero, so the Dext doesn’t quite manage to duke it out with the best Android phone just yet it may get updated in the future, but given the excellent YouTube application it’s not necessarily missed that much just yet.If you click a video link you’ll get asked if you want to try and view it in the Browser or YouTube it’s a simple pop up that’s been around on most Android handsets for a while, but we still love it.Other Android phones let you share pages to Facebook, Twitter or other locations from the menu, but you can only share these sites to email and text on the Motorola Dext considering the integration with Facebook and Twitter we can’t understand this decision.Another real problem we encountered was the inability to download well, anything. A long press on internet pictures will bring up a menu asking to save or view the image but when we asked to save it, the Dext simply told us that the download was unsuccessful. Whether there are some settings we accidentally disturbed that stopped us being able to download we don’t know.The internet experience on the Motorola Dext is very good thanks to a great Android browser and the screen responsiveness puts it on a par with the iPhone, with the superb mobile Safari application on the iPhone, and easily the peer of the HTC Hero and Magic in terms of speed and performance.The imaging functionality on the Motorola Dext isn’t of the highest quality, which is hardly unexpected when you consider the phone doesn’t have a flash and a small sensor bolted to the rear of the phone above the battery cover.In its defence, it’s a 5MP effort with autofocus and geo-tagging but that’s sadly not enough to save it. HTC has made the same mistake with its Android range, focusing on other features and leaving the camera as an afterthought, and it feels like that’s what Motorola has done here with the Dext.Starting the phone up also takes far too long, but that’s more the fault of Android, as there’s a terrible shutter lag something it intends to fix in the 1.6 Donut upgrade.However, there are some nice touches our clear favourite was only aesthetic, as when you twist the phone between portrait and landscape modes, the display spins the icons with you. It’s a nice touch, and shows how much more intuitive phones are becoming in the age of the smartphone.There are also some nice options in the colour settings you can do more than the plain old Sepia and Negative now say hello to Solarise and Aqua. The latter is less exciting, making everything look like it’s under water by adding a grey-blue sheen.But Solarise keeps everything the same colour, except the brighter parts, spinning them into a hallucinogenic colour scramble, and something we didn’t expect on the Dext.The only other options users will be able to play with to improve picture quality are… well, Picture Quality (named Good, Better and Best) and white balance. It’s not a lot, but we guess it can make outrageously bad shots look okay.Video recordingVideo on the Dext is only available at HVGA and at 24 frames per second, which is considerable lower resolution than other comparable phones. For instance, the iPhone 3GS has managed to pack VGA recording, the equivalent of a DVD, and 30fps for a very smooth experience.The Dext doesn’t manage anywhere near that, resulting in some pretty choppy and jerky footage. It looks like ’stereotypical’ mobile phone video, and after being able to record in HD on the Samsung i8910HD, we guess we expect a little bit more these days.You can share straight to a variety of sources from the camera (be it the camera or camcorder) including Picasa, Facebook, MySpace and YouTube.Android has a decent media experience, if a little bit basic, and Motorola has tried to update this a little bit by adding in some 3D effects.However, Motorola has defaulted to Android’s basic media package for most of the applications, meaning it’s a basic but functional experience most of the time.MusicThe Android layout for music on the Dext is the same as it has been for the Magic, G1 and Galaxy thus far, with a simple layout for Artist, Album, Songs and Playlists.The UI for music playback is similarly simple, with album artwork, song title and other titbits of information next to some large and easy to use touch buttons.One cool feature is the ability to touch the Artist’s name, for instance, and search for content relating to them in the web browser or over YouTube. The latter is a nice addition, and especially relevant now the UK problems with the PRS are over and a multitude of videos are now available online.Music lovers might not see this as the ultimate audio device, but there’s a simple library layout to the tracks as well as party shuffle mode although we’re not sure we’d want to go to a party when the tunes are being pumped out by a Motorola Dext.However, the single speaker is a pretty good effort, vibrating the case of the phone with its power. It’s loud, a touch bassy and not as tinny as others it’s not going to replace a sound system but for watching a video it’s pretty good. VideoThe Video Gallery on the Dext has been overhauled compared to other Android phones and finally resembles something close to a media suite on a mobile. Not only are the videos arranges in a thumbnail grid, users can also tag videos (presumably before uploading to YouTube, which you can do directly from the gallery, or share it between friends via email or similar).There’s also a video editing suite for your personal vids, where you can crop the footage, delete audio or take a still from a video frame. It might not sound like much, but it’s a big leap forward for the Android clan and something to be applauded from Motorola.Video playback still has the nice large icons for skipping and scrolling through the file, and it doesn’t look too bad on the screen. Having seen full widescreen VGA screens on other phones, the playback can never look amazing in comparison, especially on a 3.1-inch screen, but it’s more than passable.YouTubeYouTube is back again on the Google-powered Android OS, with a simple interface allowing access to a growing number of videos. It might not mimic the full breadth of the website version, but it’s pretty good now and it will only improve in terms of content.The playback is the same as video files at high quality the videos look the same as if they were stored on the phone. However, you have to activate this quality mode (over 3G at least, with Wi-Fi defaulting to it automatically) which means some users will never realise it’s available as it’s hidden down a few menus.The Motorola Dext is probably the most full-featured Android handset on the market at the moment in terms of media, and with Spotify on board this will really rock.iMeem has been supplied out the box, but we’ll deal with that in the Applications section of the review.We mentioned earlier that there was a problem with the Android Market on our phone and it’s a big one. We basically can’t download any applications from the portal, which is bizarre to say the least. We signed into our Google account, loaded up the portal, selected a number of different applications, but while they would all state they were ‘Starting Download’ none of them actually did. We can only hope this is a simple problem with our handset and not a more widespread mistake from Motorola we’d advise users to check their new Dext as soon as it comes out the box in case it needs a fix.EARLY UPDATE: We’ve spoken at length with Motorola, and a spokesperson has told us that Android Market will be available to all Motorola Dext users in the UK from 6 October (the first launch date), so we’ll keep our fingers crossed that this will be case and no users will have to suffer a broken Market.That said there are some cool applications on board already, which are enough to be getting on with in case you need to wait.iMeem Mobile and ShazamThe former of these two is very similar in style to last.fm, allowing you to enter an artist and hear a song or two from them. Users can skip a track a certain number of times per hour, and favourite the ones they like for future reference.It connects quickly, works well but isn’t a patch on Spotify. Except for the fact it’s free it all depends on your favoured way of discovering music. There’s no way to listen to the tracks offline though, so in some cases you’d be better off listening to internet radio instead.The latter application is the same as the 2-5-8-0 mobile service, except this time it’s free and visual. It’s still dumbfounding the way it can work out the tracks you’re listening to, and now it offers links to viewing them on YouTube (brilliant) and to purchase them off Amazon MP3 (cheap).It’s similar to Samsung’s Music Finder on its phone range except the tracks it suggests cost around three or four times more than the Amazon equivalents.Orange / Google MapsPre-loaded with maps on board, we like Orange Maps, in the same way we prefer Nokia Maps when we can’t get a signal for Google’s version. Both are included on the Motorola Dext (Orange and Google, not Nokia obviously) and while we like Orange’s effort with saveable points and specific searches, we just prefer the familiarity of Google’s.Both applications pick up GPS blindingly well, even indoors, and respond to the touchscreen well too. We advise you take a look at both options and decide which is best for you especially as Orange’s includes turn by turn navigation.QuickofficeIt’s pretty easy to tell what this one does but the great thing is you can check out documents on the move, be it PowerPoint, Word or Excel. It’s basic but functional, and we’re glad to see it breaking out of its Symbian base to be included on an Android phone with the Dext.Given the Motorola Dext has a 1400mAh battery life, we’re a little disappointed in its performance. Measuring how well battery life performs has become increasingly difficult as phones become more connected powering up your handset every night while you sleep has become the norm for a lot of people.Motorola is quoting a standby time of around 320 hours for the Dext, which equates to around 13 days without needing to be charged. We gave the Dext a pretty hardcore pummelling on the first couple of days, connecting to the internet frequently, using the music player and watching videos.Add to that the fact the phone is constantly pulling down new Happenings, and you can see why the power would run down quickly. The battery was sadly flat within 16 hours, but in our opinion that’s more than enough time.As we dialled back the usage, we managed to extend that to nearly 20 hours, which means that while you might not get away with missing a charge night, day to day usage won’t be affected.One worrying thing we noted was that on occasion the battery would get a little warm and charge down quickly we’ve seen this before in other phones, and it’s generally intermittent and solved by upgrades, so just keep an eye out for such an instance.OrganiserThe Motorola Dext isn’t really a phone designed for organisation, although the Google Calendar function is pretty good experience. Fast synchronisation with the web means you’re always up to date, and it’s easy to simply drag and create new events on the phone, which can then be viewed online.You can choose a range of alerts for upcoming events on your G-calendar, which appear in the notification bar by default for easy reminders of when you actually have to stop playing on your phone and do things in the real world.The screen displays the information well, and you can choose a variety of views, such as day, week and month to manage your life. If you’re someone who needs a calendar to use day to day for work or the like, this is a great experience, and something we’ve come to expect from Google.Other software isn’t so plentiful, with the calculator the only real other option in terms of organising your life. There’s a rudimentary alarm clock (with a new arty-style clock instead of the stark black and white option) but that’s about it (unless you count the Quick Office application).Connectivity on the Motorola Dext is as well stocked as most mobile phones it’s got Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP stereo streaming, GPS and 3.5G connection (up to 7.2Mbps).Wi-Fi is a little patchy at times for some reason it kept deciding against connecting to our secured browser, resulting in us having to trudge through the settings to force it to connect. It’s not the best when you consider other Android phones and the iPhone can maintain a connection to wireless networks without a hitch we’d hoped for better here.Bluetooth was more of a success it synchronised with our Jabra Halo headphones on the third time of asking then stayed stable and automatically connected when they were switched back on. It did have trouble playing music through the headphones for the first minute or two, despite stating it was connected, but it was fine after that.As we mentioned before, the GPS on the Motorola Dext is excellent, connecting well when we’re were out and about, and even managing to find us indoors. It upset us when the likes of the Samsung i7500 Galaxy just refused to work for no reason, and this was a much more pleasant experience.The 3G connection was also stable, working well in all the places we’re used to getting a strong signal. It might be a while before everyone can get the full 7.2Mbps download speed in the UK, but at least the Dext will be ready for when they do. It’s a shame we couldn’t actually test stuff downloading to see how fast it really is, but hopefully Motorola will fix this in the near future.Motorola is certainly back the Dext is a phone with a lot to talk about. Moto’s had a good hard think about a lot of new ideas for the phone, and the MotoBlur platform shows it’s serious about configuring the software side of things as much as hardware.There’s a lot riding on the Dext for Motorola, so has it actually put the right bits in the correct places?We liked:Nobody likes to see a company slide out of existence, so we’re happy to report that the Dext is a decent handset with some nice features.MotoBlur is, overall, a good thing for Android, building well on the new trend for social networking integration on mobile phones.Messaging your friends through the huge variety of mediums is a great thing to be able to do, and we’re pleased Motorola is offering something that no other manufacturer is doing right now by integrating all the platforms so tightly.The touchscreen is great, with swiping through the multiple updates easy to do and most applications easy to find and use without any prompting. We also really enjoyed using the QWERTY and virtual keyboards, with both offering us something cool and useful.The Dext is probably the best media handset running Android on the market at the moment we liked the video layout and native editing support especially, and we’re going to be photographing everything in Solarise from now on.We disliked:The build quality of the phone is inevitably going to come in for criticism, as it’s not up to the usual Motorola standards. The phone itself is huge compared to its peers, and it’s obvious a number of people are going to be instantly put off by its size.The placement of the power/lock keys isn’t the most intuitive either the amount of times we pressed the wrong key was annoying.Not being able to download anything off Android Market was a real problem too we hope the problem simply melts away on launch day, as it currently scuppers a huge part of the phone’s appeal.The camera certainly isn’t the best on the market we’d have preferred a flash or a better lens over more megapixels.The lag when running multiple applications is disappointing too, especially as it’s unlikely Motorola will be able to do anything about it it’s certainly not as bad as other phones on the market, but when it happens it’s very noticeable.Verdict:We swayed backwards and forwards over the Dext MotoBlur is an odd proposition due to the amount of information it displays, but over time we came to like it.The shape is obviously going to put a lot of people off buying the Dext, but we think the QWERTY keypad will similarly win over a few who might be bored of touchscreen keyboards.There are a few bugs in the system of the phone we tested we hope Motorola acts quickly to iron them out, as it seems that many (like the Market problem) are fixable with a swift settings tweak.It’s free on a 35 a month, two year deal that’s a little pricey for a phone that will appeal to teenagers and young adults. We’re still waiting for a SIM-free price, but we believe it will land somewhere around the 500 mark, which is a lot for a chunky Android handset, despite the cool bells and whistles.We have to label the Motorola Dext in the same way we looked at the HTC Hero MotoBlur is a good platform, but it needs a better phone underneath it before it’s a true player. Like the G1 was for Android, the Dext is a marker for what Motorola can achieve, but the Dext isn’t going to be the pinnacle if Motorola is to have its hoped-for renaissance.Related LinksMore mobile phone reviewsTechRadar’s Reviews GuaranteeSearch for the best Motorola Dext MB220 deals at OmioRelated StoriesReview: Samsung Galaxy i7500Review: Samsung Blade GT-S5600VReview: HTC Touch2Review: Sony Ericsson SatioReview: Sony Ericsson Aino
Review: LG BL40 Chocolate
LG has brought another edition to its Black Label line, this time in the shape of the LG BL40 Chocolate. The world’s first full cinematic screen mobile, the new Chocolate brings LG’s richest feature set yet.Given there’s no phone out there quite like the BL40 Chocolate, it’s hard to see who this phone is aimed at. LG maintains it’s one for the fashionista, thanks to the Black Label tag, yet a full 21:9 (cinematic) screen is definitely one for the hardcore PMP lover.You can tell by the styling that this phone is meant for the user who likes to enjoy looking at his or her phone as much as using it. The chassis is a combination of metal and glass, with vibrant red plastic at either end, with the top housing the 3.5mm headphone port and the power/lock key.The left-hand side of the LG BL40 Chocolate has a dedicated music key to take you straight to your tracks, which needs to be held down for a while to get it working. It’s embedded into the thin metal stripe running around the outside of the chassis, and is a nice look for the phone. There’s also a hinged microUSB slot here as well, with a very solid-feeling cover, similar to the one seen on the LG Crystal recently.A similar system is on place on the right-hand side too, where the volume up and down buttons are built into the chassis like a kind of wave, and the camera key is a raised, metallic ellipsis. It sounds very fancy, and to be honest, it very much is.What’s odd is there are no touch sensitive keys, like those we saw on the original LG Chocolate. It’s basically a fully black front, save for the LG logo, the speaker and a small video camera.The rear of the LG BL40 Chocolate is the equally shiny, but this time plastic, solid black cover, again very minimalist, with the LG logo, a small amount of lettering to let you know the lens is Schneider Kreuznach and the 5MP camera with LED flash. Overall it’s a very well laid out phone (if not a little bit odd looking) and in the hand it works rather well.The depth of 10.9mm feels very comfortable in the palm, and despite the early worries from some, fits fine in the male pocket. We’re not sure if this is meant to be a phone aimed at the ladies yet, but if you’re a guy hankering after a 21:9 phone, then this will fit you nicely.The interface is again the S-Class UI from LG, and thankfully this time it’s been overhauled to work a lot better than before. The LG BL40 Chocolate brings a capacitive screen which is a lot more responsive than efforts from the likes of the Crystal or the Arena, and that’s a welcome relief after being frustrated by LG for so long.The ‘wipe-ability’ of the screen on the LG BL40 Chocolate is actually very impressive, with minimal lag on the whole from the phone and a decent zip about it. For instance, the lock screen requires just a gentle swipe upwards to open up, and from that moment on we were impressed with how intuitive the LG BL40 Chocolate’s UI was.The lock screen also brings something similar to Samsung (shocking, we know) in the shape of gesture unlocking, where you can draw a shape onto the lock screen and open up an application. Think an ‘M’ for messaging, a circle for the browser and so on, with a huge range of applications and shapes on offer for each.The nice thing about this is that you can actually see the shape you’re drawing, where on the Samsung version you just had to blindly fumble around the screen like a myopic teenager on his first female encounter.The menu system has been tweaked, rather than overhauled, and the S-Class spinning cube is still in effect. We’re still not convinced that it’s necessary, as you can simply swipe left and right on the home screen to look at contacts, bookmarks, widgets and the like anyway, but if LG wants to put it on there, we’re not going to stop it.The cool new thing about the spinning cube is that it actually updates with what’s on the screen, whereas before it was a set picture on each side. It’s not of massive importance, but it brings an extra touch of cool to the whole interface.It has to be said that the screen on the LG BL40 Chocolate is absolutely stunning. We’re talking an 800×345 resolution (which is apparently ‘true’ VGA, according to LG) but we still can’t believe that it’s not an OLED screen under there, as the colours are just so vivid and the black so deep.We’ve always found it strange that LG doesn’t use OLEDs in its mobile phones, especially when it’s one of the world’s largest producers of them, but there we go, here’s a TFT LCD that apes an OLED’s performance (except in terms of battery life).The overall interface is much faster than before, although it’s still woefully sluggish in places. Opening up the memory card or the contacts folder brought the ‘loading’ screen with a spinning icon far too often, and we can only hope and pray that LG brings out a firmware update soon to rectify this.The size of the phone is a bit of a hindrance to one handed operation too, as there are necessary buttons at the top and the bottom of the LG BL40 Chocolate. The home screen and multi-tasking buttons are at the bottom of the device, and are nice and easy to hit.But if you’re not using the phone in landscape mode then the menu and exit buttons (located at the top) are much harder to hit, with you having to perform a fair amount of adjustment in the hand to get to them.The multi-tasking button is an odd choice as well, as we’re more used to accessing this by long pressing one of the physical keys. Why this had to be placed at the bottom as a virtual key rather than assigned to something like the volume button we don’t know.But the upgrade in touch sensitivity is a real boon for the LG BL40 Chocolate, and means things like swishing through the menu are much easier than ever before.Calling friends on the LG BL40 Chocolate is a much more pleasant experience than before; with the length of the phone raising call quality somewhat.The phone dialler has the older version of smart dial, where it will recognise the number coming up and offer phonebook options containing that combination. That’s an OK option, but when we’ve seen the likes of the Nokia E52 bringing the name up based on the predictive text combination of the keys, we’re a little nonplussed by this method now.With the lack of dedicated call/terminate keys, the phone dialler is an odd experience, with virtual keys needed to be pressed to bring up things like the call history.A nice touch on the LG BL40 Chocolate is the fact you can view the call history of a given contact within that person’s entry - icons at the top let you choose between the two.Network coverage was pretty good on the LG BL40 Chocolate too. It may have struggled to regain signal when on the train, moving in and out of coverage, but on the whole it’s pretty good.As we mentioned above, the contacts list has been nicely enriched to allow you to see all the conversations between you and your friends from the contact listing, as well as being able to make them your favourites and add them to the home screen.When doing so, they can either be arranged in a grid or a scroll wheel - once again the improved touch interface makes this a whole lot nicer to use, with a greater degree of ease when spinning it to get to your favourite.From the favourites menu you can access the basic functions you need when calling - ie voice and video, editing and so on. The same things are available from the main listing too, but with more settings to play with, such as moving the storage location. When searching for a contact from the list, you can either scroll through manually, use the side tab to move or enter the friend’s name into the search bar. Annoyingly the virtual keypad is shown automatically, so 99 per cent of the time you’ll have to shut this down before you can properly use the contacts menu.Video calling is nothing exciting, and we doubt it’s going to be a huge application for the LG BL40 Chocolate. You get to see your face and the other person’s in quite good detail, as you’d expect from such a massive screen, but the quality’s not too great throughout the call and the speakerphone is a bit too tinny for our liking.Messaging on LG’s S-Class line up has been something of a hindrance for nearly all the phones, and thankfully the LG BL40 Chocolate performs a lot better than its predecessors. Having said that, it still suffers from a number of the same problems, but the improved touchscreen is the saving grace.The text input on the Arena, Crystal and Viewty Smart is woeful in landscape mode, and with the others, horrifically inaccurate in QWERTY mode.The LG BL40 Chocolate’s portrait mode is still the same as before - when using the predictive text, you have no virtual key to scroll through the choice of words with. This is fine most of the time, with the auto-correcting words very accurate we found, but should you want to add a comma into a sentence, you have to move your finger up from the pad to the message and strike the drop-down menu. Then you have to manually scroll through to find the comma and, given this is a tiny menu, it’s a pretty tricky task.We get annoyed when our messaging flow is broken for a mere millisecond - throw in a few seconds here and we’re getting pretty irritated.As mentioned, texting in the landscape mode is a much better experience, if a little cramped with the phone not ideal to hold between two hands.What is annoying is the amount of text you can see when you’re writing, with it limited to just the single line of the message. We understand the thin screen isn’t conducive to reams of text, but it would have been nice to see a little bit more of our inane witterings on the screen.The QWERTY keyboard is good and responsive though, meaning texting this way is a doddle. However, the bad news is that for many occasions where text input isn’t for messaging (such as entering information into a field) there’s no option to use the QWERTY method, which means you have to mess about with the portrait mode again.Weirdly you can ‘cc’ people into the conversation in messages, which is a novel idea for a text. Adding an element in (through the drop-down menu in the corner) will automatically turn it into an MMS and, of course, there are email opportunities a-plenty on the LG BL40 Chocolate.The most impressive of the lot is being able to have push email from a variety of web sources, such as Hotmail, Google mail and Yahoo Mail. It sadly is built on top of the Java platform, so it’s not too tightly integrated with the phone, but it happily runs in the background.However, setting it to run in the background is actually very hard - we eventually worked out the only way to do it was to open multi-tasking and then head to the menu before navigating to the home screen.Messages that were being pushed also took around a minute to arrive after they had appeared in our Google mail inbox online, which is a little tardy for such a service.But at least it’s better than the in-built email server, which asks you to do all manner of things before not managing to pull down new email. You need to enter the user name, password, email address, SMTP and IMAP/POP settings before you even get to downloading mail.And despite only having 400 messages in our inbox (and setting the pull limit to 1,000) the mailbox on the phone still didn’t recognise new messages, and wasted a huge amount of data pulling old messages down that were no longer relevant and deciding to stop at the start of the year. We had more luck when switching from POP to IMAP forwarding from our Google mail account, but we doubt many fashion-phone lovers are going to want to do the same thing.One of the big things promised by LG with the BL40 Chocolate was the ability to have a dual screen UI - basically it’s so wide that you can see two programs open at once.Well, messaging was the only time we saw this little trick, and even then it wasn’t that exciting. You basically opened a message, turned the phone to landscape and the inbox with all the messages showed on the left, a message preview on the right. It’s good, and we hope LG makes more use of it with future firmware updates.The internet browser on the LG BL40 Chocolate was as good as you’d expect it to be, browsing in full HTML swiftly over Wi-Fi and HSDPA connections.Not only are we treated to some intelligent smart-fit technology, but there’s the now standard LG pinch-and-zoom. It might not be quite up to the level of the iPhone 3GS, but it’s certainly a lot closer than it was before, with more accurate touch recognition.HOMESCREEN BOOKMARKS: The LG BL40 Chocolate brings thumbnail bookmarks to the homescreenWeb browsing might be fairly speedy in terms of navigating from one site to another, but the rendering of the heavier sites, particularly those with Flash, caused the LG BL40 Chocolate to slow down quite considerably at times, even to a freeze at one point.However, pressing links worked better than it has done in the past with other S-Class devices, although it lacked the easy precision of the Android range or the iPhone, which seem to almost instinctively know which element of the page you’re after.One thing we do like is the visual history, with each page laid out as a thumbnail to be scrolled through, meaning it’s easy to find the page you were browsing last week or similar.RSS feeds, so often included in mobile web browsers yet so hard to use most of the time, were much easier to use on the LG BL40 Chocolate, with the phone automatically discerning any present on the page.BASIC RSS: The LG BL40 Chocolate has an average but functional RSS readerAll you have to do then is choose to add it, and you can view those feeds via a menu item on the browser when you fire up the internet.Another cool trick the LG BL40 Chocolate brings to the table is the notion of being able to save pages and view them later, like the offline files you can use on your PC at home. This is particularly useful for the common commuter who goes underground and out of signal regularly, as they can set up regular pages to be looking at when in signal.Overall, we were mostly impressed with the browser. It renders quickly for most sites, is easy to flick around a web page with and generally shows more of the page thanks to the widescreen view. It’s still not the most accurate under the finger though, and if you’re zoomed out of any web page, forget about trying to hit any fiddly bits like drop-down menus as it simply isn’t happening.The camera on the LG BL40 Chocolate is a decent 5MP effort with a single LED flash, and the de rigeur Schneider Kreuznach lens set.It’s actually a decent snapper for a phone that’s aimed at the style conscious, with a good range of photo options for a variety of snapping scenarios.We’re never going to be convinced by the use of a beauty shot mode for helping make your friends look a bit prettier, but there are some useful things in there to help out.The phone seems to want to automatically put the photo grid on at the start of any photo - we tried to remove it, but the BL40 Chocolate was having none of it.Changing modes is as easy as ever, and the wide screen makes it much easier to hit the virtual scroll wheel to change the settings (such as increasing the ISO or messing about with the white balance).Here’s how the LG BL40 Chocolate compared with our Olympus SP565-UZ 10MP prosumer camera.Shooting a variety of colours in shot is a little tricky for the BL40, with a washed out appearance compared to the Olympus:LG BL40 Chocolate:Olympus SP565-UZ:The Chocolate struggles in bright light too, with the foreground almost completely obliterated:LG BL40 Chocolate:Olympus SP565-UZ:We were surprised to see the digital zoom worked so well - it actually rivals the optical effort on the Olympus for short zooming in:LG BL40 Chocolate:Olympus SP565-UZ:How LG has done this, we don’t know, but it’s managed to make the flash on the Chocolate a little brighter than the sun. The following picture is the best we could do - others were almost impossible to see any detail in at all:LG BL40 Chocolate:Olympus SP565-UZ:The LG BL40 Chocolate also takes some nice pictures with the inbuilt modes, the art shot being one of the weirdest, as it seemed to simply blur out the edges, rather than fading in and out:The auto shots function also works very well with varying light levels - we were just shooting randomly around to see what came out and we were pleased with this photo:We were probably most excited to try out the media player on the LG BL40 Chocolate, mainly because anyone that’s ever seen a movie played on Philips’ 21:9 TV will know true widescreen is just breathtaking.We weren’t disappointed by the video player on the LG BL40 Chocolate either, giving high resolution options with a variety of video playback formats. Most of the options we dumped on the phone were AVI and MP4 files, but it can also handle DivX and Xvid according to the spec sheet as well, so it’s a fully functional PMP as well as a cool mobile.If your video is in the normal 16:9 aspect ratio, you can choose to stretch it out by simply double tapping to fill up the screen. Some videos will look better than others in this mode, but it’s cool to have the opportunity anyway.You can watch videos in both portrait and landscape modes, with the former obviously a lot worse than the latter for seeing the action in sharp detail. However, one glitch we noticed was the phone would un-pause itself when moving between the modes, so if you sat down or stood up, music would suddenly start blaring out of the speaker or your headphones. It seems like a little problem though, and something we anticipate LG fixing shortly.The gallery function is interesting, as you can view your content in a 3D list when you’re flicking through it in landscape mode. Not only that, but you can move the view around to see the icons from the side or above, which is pretty cool. However, you can’t see the filenames, which means you have to be really familiar with the thumbnail of the movie or song you want to use, as otherwise you’ll just be blindly stabbing in the dark.The 3.5mm headphone jack is obviously a nice touch for such a slim design, and is well complemented by the addition of Dolby Mobile, which adds a nice amount of improved sound quality to proceedings.We found that Dolby’s sound improvement worked better on videos than for music for some reason, adding a somewhat unnecessary amount of bass to the tunes (although we’re being picky here - the sound quality is more than adequate for day to day listening).There’s only 1GB of storage onboard the LG BL40 Chocolate don’t forget, which is fine for a few albums but you’ll need to buy a separate memory card if you’re going to extend this further with a few films.We’re not great fans of the way music tracks are laid out with the LG S-Class system, but that’s changed slightly with the new LG BL40 Chocolate.LOCK NOTIFICATIONS: You can see which song is playing even when the phone is lockedYou can look at them in the boring old list mode, or you can use the vertical cover flow to spin through you albums as well.If that’s not enough for you, flipping the phone into the landscape mode will bring up a spinning dial with all the discs laid out for you to browse through too. It’s not going to change the way you listen to music, and to be honest, there are easier ways to find your music. However, this is a cool way to do it, and for a phone that’s already embraced the unconventional, such design ideas make sense.The FM radio needs a headset to work, but we are treated to a spot of RDS and of course that cool scroll dial to look for new stations. Again, it’s a nice feature to have but hardly a deal breaker, although the sheer amount of stations you can add is a pleasant positive, especially as it doubles as a transmitter too.The LG BL40 Chocolate is chock-full (sorry) of cool applications and games to be getting on with when you’re bored when out and about. Admittedly, you’ll tire of most of them quickly and then not know what to do, but some are really cool and all make use of the phone’s capabilities.For instance, there are a whole host of options under the Games and Applications icon, in the ‘Fun Stuff’ section. We’re talking about things like Bubble Breeze, where you have to blow bubbles by blowing into the microphone. Apparently there’s some kind of game to it, but we actually fell off our chair at one point because we got so light headed (sadly true).There’s a variant on arcade favourite Bubble Bobble, a spot the difference game that gets far too hard too quickly in our opinion, and the coolest of the lot, a piano that you can play using the touchscreen.Admittedly, some of these aren’t super accurate (such as the piano - sadly) but they’re still very much worth messing around with in idle moments… although we suggest you steer clear of Bubble Breeze in public.LG has decided to put a very good racing game in the LG BL40 Chocolate, Asphalt Elite 4, then another one, presumable of its own making, called Racing Time 2. The former is very cool - the latter is very slow paced and akin to walking round a race track and throwing your arms left and right to steer.Monopoly, Tetris and Brain Challenge are all there too, although these are all only available as demos, which is why you can see the reasoning behind LG putting a load of fun little games in there too.Other applications include the full Google Mobile suite under an icon in the menu, with Mail, Maps and Blogger all available, with YouTube also present, although this is merely a link to the recently upgraded YouTube Mobile.WisePilot for LG is also included, and serves as a pretty good mini-sat nav when Google Maps fails you. The GPS signal is found very quickly considering (just over a minute from being switched on, and much faster after that) and there are points of interest, directions and more onboard for the average lost-in-the-woods scenario (we’re assuming you’re lost in woods near to a town, as that’s what would likely happen to us).There’s also the Movie Maker application which LG has insisted on putting on its phone for years now. It’s basically the chance to cycle through a load of pictures to a musical track - can somebody please tell LG this isn’t a movie maker, it’s a glorified PowerPoint on the mobile?Battery life on the LG BL40 Chocolate is sadly very poor. The screen might look very pretty, but it must absolutely drain the power source, and these days 1000mAh batteries aren’t big enough for this kind of device.Using the internet on and off for an hour drained the battery down one bar, having the Push Email running in the background did the lifetime of a single charge no favours, and the video player really ate into the power too.It seems that to fit everything into such a slim frame, LG had to decide what to shave off, and power management must have been high on that list. It’s not a twice-a-day charge job or anything, but it came close on occasion for us during our time with it, and that’s us only having it for a week.There are ways of helping it out, such as turning off auto-brightness and sliding the brightness of the LG BL40 Chocolate right down (it’s not that bad). Colours might not look as vivid, but at least you’ll still be able to call people.The Utilities section of the phone is as well stocked as you’d expect from a feature phone such as the LG BL40 Chocolate, with things like memos, calendar, multiple alarms and world clock all in attendance. Other than that, the calculator, timer and stopwatch all do exactly what they promise to do and not a lot more.The LG BL40 Chocolate is well stocked when it comes to connectivity, and brings a few things you might not expect.Of course there’s the normal range of options, Bluetooth with A2DP 2.1, Wi-Fi connectivity, 3.5G HSDPA. We were also very pleasantly surprised to find an FM transmitter on board as well, meaning you can pump your tunes or add in some real time surround sound to your videos if you’ve got speakers hooked up to a radio.The GPS chip, ably helped by a little aGPS number, works well, as we mentioned before. It starts up quickly and integrates well into the applications on board (WisePilot and Google Maps) with a good strength of connectivity holding on even in covered portions of the outdoors.DLNA is also covered by the LG BL40 Chocolate, so if you’ve got yourself a home media network you’ll be able to both discover and share media across it, although this can be a little bit tricky to set up. Our tip - make sure you’ve got the latest version of Windows Media Player running on a PC somewhere and you’ve set to allow sharing in the options panel.We’re torn over the LG BL40 Chocolate. It’s a very different phone and the most important thing is to commend a company for trying something different. These days all we see are iClones hitching rides in people’s pockets, but LG has looked at the humble remote control and said: ‘We could make a phone out of that.’We likedThere’s a lot to like on the LG BL40 Chocolate. A lot. Firstly, the high resolution and very vivid screen is exquisite and the capacitive element is very responsive (especially compared to other options in the S-Class family).For movie watching, we particularly like being able to see things in 21:9. It’s not essential, but then again this phone isn’t anything other than a luxury device. The styling is very pretty, with the minimalist front and back flanked nicely by stylised buttons - we don’t know if it’s aimed at men or women, but both can appreciate it.The interface is much improved as well, with the 3D navigation something that we really liked to have a play with and show off to friends.The camera isn’t too bad quality either, with the 5MP effort taking some decent photos and using the limited hardware on offer to good effect.We dislikedWe’re still not fans of the S-Class UI, and we’re starting to wonder if we ever will be. The LG BL40 Chocolate is essentially a phone that works pretty well with a glossy skin over the top - there’s nothing massively wrong with it exactly, it just doesn’t float our boat.The battery life is far less than we’re looking for on a mobile phone of this calibre, and it will be interesting if LG manages to sort this out with future batches of the phone thanks to internal tweaking.The OS lags a bit too much for our liking at times, and the audio could be a bit better on some occasions, considering Dolby Mobile is in there powering things. The internet is a bit clunky too, and the overall design of the software and hardware means you have to constantly keep re-adjusting your hand to get to the controls.We’d also like to see the email system sorted out soon - it seems to us there might be an easy fix to get it running very smoothly and effectively, it’s just not there yet.VerdictThe LG BL40 Chocolate is a great and bold step to be admired. There are some gripes to be had, mostly with the OS and battery life, but they’re minor in the grand scheme of things. The phone will certainly appeal to those who want to make a statement with their mobile and aren’t afraid to use a little bit of tech now and again. If you can get your head around the multiple camera modes, are willing to fork out for a bigger memory card, want to watch a bit of video and are happy to learn to navigate the internet in a new fashion, then this phone should definitely be on your watch list when it comes time to renew your contract.Search for the best LG BL40 Chocolate deals at Omio.Related LinksMore mobile phone reviewsTechRadar’s Reviews GuaranteeSearch for the best LG BL40 Chocolate deals at OmioRelated StoriesReview: Samsung Blade GT-S5600VReview: Motorola Dext MB200Review: HTC Touch2Review: Sony Ericsson SatioReview: Sony Ericsson Aino