Those of you that have been reading my mini-mini-reviews of devices (the ‘five-minute fiddle’ series), will I’m sure be pleased to know that I’ve had a little hands-on time now with the LG BL40m – aka the ‘New Chocolate’.
So what’s the New Choc like then? Well,
Screen – hey, we gotta take that first – it’s enormous – well, wide anyway. It’s the screen that gives the device it’s distinctive (read: long) form-factor, and for the most part it’s good, display-wise. Colours are bright and sharp – important from a device that is being touted as widescreen for use with movies
Touch-sensitivity – it’s a capacitance screen (which I like), but the sensitivity isn’t quite as good as the iPhone – practically that translates in to occasional missed button presses on-screen. It’s not a serious problem, just irritating, especially for things like typing
Build quality – seems very good overall – can’t fault it
Speed of O/S – Yurgh – it’s a a little dopey, and surprisingly, not 100% smoothly animated. If you are going to animate the whole screen by rolling icons around, or putting multiple homescreens on a 3D cube, you’d better animate well! Disappointing…
O/S ease of use – it’s pretty self-explanatory after you get used to the structure of the homescreens and menu icon. Quirks are that each individual row of icons can be spun along/round, rather than the whole screen. Usable, but there are a LOT of icons!
Auto-screen-rotate – works OK. Not amazing
Media-handling – the pre-loaded film trailers were REALLY badly encoded, and whilst the picture was great, the sound was terrible. However, this shouldn’t reflect badly on the device, and my impression is that doing what the device was primarily designed for, which is watching movies, it will be pretty good. The widescreen really stands out for proper movie formatting…
Conclusion: I might have it as a second device if I were a movie buff that wanted to carry a lot of films with me, and do some occasional texting/calls. Not outstanding, but not terrible – looking forward to a follow-up device to see what they do with that!
Overall rating: Ambivalent
Grade: C (if not a movie buff) / B (if you watch a lot of movies)
Those of you that have been reading my mini-mini-reviews of devices (the ‘five-minute fiddle’ series), will I’m sure be pleased to know that I’ve had a little hands-on time now with the LG BL40 – aka the ‘New Chocolate’.
So what’s the BL40 like then? Well:
- Screen – hey, we gotta take that first – it’s enormous – well, wide anyway. It’s the screen that gives the device it’s distinctive (read: long) form-factor, and for the most part it’s good, display-wise. Colours are bright and sharp – important from a device that is being touted as widescreen for use with movies
- Touch-sensitivity – it’s a capacitance screen (which I like), but the sensitivity isn’t quite as good as the iPhone – practically that translates in to occasional missed button presses on-screen. It’s not a serious problem, just irritating, especially for things like typing
- Build quality – seems very good overall – can’t fault it
- Speed of UI – Yurgh – it’s a a little dopey, and surprisingly, not 100% smoothly animated. If you are going to animate the whole screen by rolling icons around, or putting multiple homescreens on a 3D cube, you’d better animate well! Disappointing…
- UI ease of use – it’s pretty self-explanatory after you get used to the structure of the homescreens and menu icon. Quirks are that each individual row of icons can be spun along/round, rather than the whole screen. Usable, but there are a LOT of icons!
- Auto-screen-rotate – works OK. Not amazing
- Media-handling – the pre-loaded film trailers were REALLY badly encoded, and whilst the picture was great, the sound was terrible. However, this shouldn’t reflect badly on the device, and my impression is that doing what the device was primarily designed for, which is watching movies, it will be pretty good. The widescreen really stands out for proper movie formatting…
Conclusion: I might have it as a second device if I were a movie buff that wanted to carry a lot of films with me, and do some occasional texting/calls. Not outstanding, but not terrible – looking forward to a follow-up device to see what they do with that!
Overall rating: Ambivalent
Grade: C (if not a movie buff) / B (if you watch a lot of movies)
[Image via: LG]