LG VX8550 Black Chocolate with Music Essential Kit 2.0

Call Quality

Calls: Calls made using the LG VX8550 Chocolate cell phone are loud, but not exactly what we would call clear. We definitely needed to use the volume keys on the cell phone’s spine to lower the volume on the handset. The comment we received from most callers tended to be along the lines of, “I can hear you, but you sound distant.” Thankfully, this Chocolate cell phone has a speakerphone, and we found call quality to be acceptable, but not stellar. We did appreciate the touch-sensitive Spkr button on the cell phone’s face. However, if you’re on a call for awhile and decide to switch to speakerphone mode, you’ll first have to unlock the phone to activate the feature.

Audio playback: We found playback of songs we downloaded from Verizon Wireless’ VCast service and our own MP3 and WMA files sounded clear through the cell phone’s built-in speaker. Note: Since the speaker is on the back of the cell phone, we recommend laying the Chocolate screen side down to get the best playback experience. Since there is a 2.5mm jack, we tried listening to music through our own 2.5mm cell phone earbuds, and while the music sounded OK, it definitely wasn’t in stereo. While the jack supports stereo, it depends on the headset if you’ll actually hear music in stereo. (Note: The Chocolate doesn't use a 3.5mm jack, so you can’t use standard stereo headsets as you would with a music-only device.) However, the LG VX8550 does support the stereo Bluetooth profile, so you can listen to music in stereo via a stereo Bluetooth headset.

Ease of Use

Menu/Phone book: At the heart of the cell phone is the typical Verizon Wireless user interface. You can still tab over to different menus once viewing a specific menu’s options. If you use the center button in the scroll wheel to launch the menu, you’ll find a circular menu wheel graphic that’s a little reminiscent of an astrological wheel. You can use the cell phone’s four-way navi-key to select different menu options.

There were some issues with the sensitivity of the scroll wheel and face keys on the debut version of the Chocolate, the VX8500; rest assured these issues have all been addressed here. Not only is the scroll wheel easy enough to use in a circular motion and not too sensitive to the touch, but you can press the scroll wheel in either the north, east, south, and west directions and it acts just like a typical four-way navi-key that you can use to navigate the phone’s interface. If that doesn’t work for you, no worries; each option in a menu file has a number associated with it, so you can press a feature’s corresponding number to access it. After using this cell phone for a while, we found our favorite button is Clr on the face of the Chocolate – it basically backs you out of any feature one screen at a time.

We particularly appreciate how easy it is to use the phone book. You can store five phone numbers and two e-mail addresses for each contact – sorry, no slots for address info. But if you want to find your phone number, you’ll need to dig through the menu system.

Camera/Video: The 1.3-megapixel camera in this LG cell phone is actually pretty good. The cell phone lacks a flash, but it has adjustment options for brightness, white balance, photometry, and color effects. There’s also a self-timer, which comes in handy when you use the tiny mirror (it’s an odd shape, and when you look into it, you may get the sensation that you’re looking at a mirror in a funhouse) next to the camera lens for snapping self-portraits. Overall, image quality is good, providing plenty of detail – especially on the highest setting. While an image might not look in focus when you’re ready to snap a pic, it actually appears a bit more in focus when saved on the cell phone. This LG Chocolate cell phone also has a video recorder. You can record 15-second videos. The picture quality is pretty good, but the sound picks up some static.

Music: The centerpiece of the LG Chocolate cell phone is its MP3 player. As noted, listening to songs played through the cell phone’s speaker is pretty good. This cell phone lacks audio-centric controls such as bass and treble; however, it does have other audio effect such as Rock, Flat, and 3D Surround. But these extra effects don’t affect audio quality too much. It does have other MP3 player features such as shuffle, repeat, and playlists that you can create on the fly, which incidentally provide one of the easier ways to play back music on this cell phone.

For starters, the LG VX8550 will support an optional 4GB MicroSD card – you can store approximately 99 albums of music on a card with that much storage capacity – that’s a lot of tunes. Although you still can’t transfer music via Bluetooth, getting music onto the cell phone is not a terribly hard task to accomplish. Of course, the easiest way to get music onto the cell phone is by downloading music from Verizon’s VCast service directly onto it. The Chocolate will play back Window Media Audio (WMA) and MP3 files only – sorry, no Apple AAC music files. One of the simpler ways to get your own music onto the cell phone is by using Verizon’s Music Essentials, which also comes with a cable to connect your cell phone to your PC. Other options for getting music onto the cell phone can be done by either dragging and dropping songs onto a MicroSD card (as long as you have a MicroSD card adapter that works with your computer) or using Windows Media Player to transfer songs to the card and then put it into the Chocolate. Note: It is likely that you will not be able to listen to songs you purchased online at a music store on this cell phone.

Connectivity/Bluetooth: We were able to easily pair the cell phone with a Motorola Bluetooth H700 headset. Additionally, we were able to pair this Chocolate with a Sony Ericsson W810i and an LG VX8100, as well as send contacts and calendar appointments via Bluetooth. As noted, you can’t use Bluetooth to transfer music stored on a computer to this Chocolate cell phone. However, kudos to Verizon Wireless for allowing customers to do a little bit more with the Bluetooth in the cell phone.

Design

Look and Feel: When the first Chocolate appeared on the scene, it was definitely a head turner, but this version of the Chocolate is arguably more attractive. It’s slightly slimmer, a tad longer, and it sports curved corners, which gives you the sense that it’s a little bit more polished. It still has a large, crisp display and a translucent keys on the face of the cell phone that looks like something out of a futuristic movie. Most notable is its iPod-centric 4-way navi-key. The scroll wheel still has grooves similar to the lines on the face of an LP record. We admit it; we really couldn’t wait to see if the scroll wheel/4-way navi-key is really all that much improved. Rest assured: this is a much better user experience.

It doesn’t hurt that the LG VX8550 is preset to vibrate just a bit when it accomplishes something. It’s like a party in your hand, which makes this cell phone just a little bit sweeter. The good new is that you probably won’t need to adjust the key and scroll wheel sensitivity immediately. The display is sharp and easily viewable in most lighting conditions. When you have such a slick-looking cell phone, there’s bound to be a couple of issues. The biggest downfall: Like its predecessor, the Chocolate attracts grease and fingerprints easily.

Keypad: The LG Chocolate keys are soft to the touch. The white backlit keys are slightly raised and easy to use (read: misdials are at a minimum on this cell phone). Thankfully, on this version of the Chocolate we fell hard for the scroll wheel, so we rarely had to rely on the numeric keypad to help navigate through the VX8550’s menus. Although the spine of the Chocolate cell phone masks the side keys well, they are easy to use, and you don’t need to apply too much effort to press them.

Our favorite LG VX8550 feature is the identifying side key labels found on the display, so you always know what each button on the cell phone’s spine does. For example, where the music key is on the side of the phone, there’s also a corresponding box with the word Music, so you know when you press that button you’re activating the music feature. The only key that we found irritating is the Voice Command key, which sits on the spine of the cell phone just below the volume keys. We rarely used this feature, but we accidentally hit it often. Maybe it was trying to tell us to give this feature more of a chance to capture our attention.

Battery Life

The LG Chocolate has better battery life than expected from such a feature-rich cell phone. We particularly appreciated that we could use the cell phone to play music for a few of hours before needing to recharge. If you want to conserve battery life we recommend keeping the display backlight at the lowest setting. Heavy cell phone users who make a ton of calls, send/receive loads of text messages daily, and listen to tunes stored on the cell phone regularly will need to recharge it every three days. More moderate users will be able to make the cell phone last about five days before needing to recharge. If you are a light user, making just two to three 10-minute calls a day along with light texting and listening to the occasional song, the Chocolate cell phone will last over a week on a single charge.