Product Description

So what makes the Chocolate look so great? The touch sensitive keypad controls? The sliding number pad? Slim design? Beautiful screen? From R&B to Heavy Metal to Easy Listening, the Chocolate lets you download from over 1 million songs on the go with V CAST music.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9041 in Cell Phone Accessories
• Color: Black
• Brand: LG
• Model: VX8500

Features

• Supports both WMA and MP3 music formats for more versitility in music listening
• With the expandable memory slot and optional 2 GB microSD memory card, you can hold up to 1000 songs
• Download and play amazing quality 3D games
• Make wires a thing of the past and keep your hands free with Bluetooth capability for wireless headsets
• Includes: Standard Li-Ion Battery, AC Travel Charger and User's Guide

Amazon.com Product Description
LG's newest mobile treat, the VX-8500 Chocolate offers minimalist-inspired style and a silky-smooth slider design. Deluxe features include support for V Cast Music, glowing touch-sensitive navigation keys, a powerful integrated music/video player, a 1.3 megapixel camera/camcorder, stereo Bluetooth capabilities, and a microSD memory slot for extra storage. If you value extreme style mixed with powerful substance, this is the phone for you.

The Chocolate's sliding keypad keeps it hidden until you need it. See the phone in 3-D.

Design
The phone features a seriously attractive open-faced design with an internal antenna and a vibrant 240 x 320 pixel, 262,000-color TFT/TFD display. A touch sensor click wheel, similar to iPod, and sliding design set the phone apart stylistically. Opening the slider reveals a numeric keypad, as well as the 1.3-megapixel camera and LED flash, which are housed on the rear of the phone. The volume and voice slide keys are on the left of the phone, while the music, camera and "end" keys are on the right side. A memory card slot is provided for MicroSD/TransFlash memory cards of up to 2 GB capacity. The phone includes 512 MB of internal memory.

Calling Features
The Chocolate boasts powerful calling functions, such as speaker independent voice dialing, which makes it easy to call contacts by simply saying their names. No prior voice training is required and you can even speak individual digits to the phone for quick dialing of numbers you know by heart. And because the Chocolate is Bluetooth enabled, wireless headsets can be configured with the phone for total handsfree operation.

The Chocolate's internal memory can hold up to 500 contacts for quick access to email addresses and phone numbers. The phone lets you easily assign pictures as well as ringtones to your most common callers. In addition to vibrating alerts, the phone supports polyphonic ringtones, and a number of ringtones come preloaded on the phone and more ringtones can be downloaded from Verizon's Get It Now service. Lastly, the Chocolate's GPS location technology pinpoints your exact location when you dial 911.

Diminutive size and incredible music functionality make this phone the complete mobile companion.

Messaging, Internet, and Tools
The phone's support for multimedia messaging means that text, photos, video and audio can be sent with ease (Verizon messaging charges apply). When used in combination with the Chocolate's built-in camera, MMS opens up a whole new world of messaging fun. There's also a built-in web browser for downloads and mobile web browsing. Verizon's optional Mobile Web 2.0 package allows you to read and send e-mails, exchange instant messages and view your favorite web content on your phone. You can check your e-mail, trade stocks online, compare prices while shopping, access flight information, get movie listings and find directions to the theater. T9 text entry, which is a technology that makes it easier for people to enter words and text on handsets, is built into the unit-- a plus for mobile email and text messaging users.

With support for the EV-DO high-speed data standard, the Chocolate is fully compatible with Verizon's V Cast service. With V Cast, you can download and stream high-quality video. Need news and weather? Get the latest Accuweather forecast delivered right to your handset, or stream CNN news headlines. ESPN sports updates, entertainment news from E!, and even Sesame Street content for the kids, are all available. V Cast also serves as a portal for enhanced 3D games, making it possible to have more fun with a new breed of realistic games.

Verizon's music service is another EV-DO-powered service that makes the Chocolate all the more desirable. With V Cast music, your phone is a music player, letting you jam out wherever you are. It's also a music store, and you can download songs instantly to your phone. Save your songs to a memory card with a capacity that's right for you. You can even pause to take a call without missing a beat.

A number of handy software tools are bundled with the Chocolate including a voice memo recorder that can record calls, a calculator, a calendar, and an alarm clock. You can even set the alarm to wake you to your favorite music. Also included with the Chocolate is Verizon's VG Navigator software, which allows you to get real-time, turn-by-turn audible directions as you're driving.

Imaging and Entertainment
The Chocolate's is a 1.3-megapixel digital camera features a flash, as well as digital zoom, self-timer, night-mode functions, and brightness and white balance controls. The camera also offers up to one-hour of video capture. A built-in music player with stereo speakers and an equalizer, offering MP3 and WMA playback, lets you keep your music playing in the background. You can also take advantage of the Chocolate's Bluetooth wireless headset capability, allowing you to hook up a pair of Bluetooth stereo headphones.

EV-DO Wireless Broadband Coverage
Learn more about where EV-DO coverage is offered.

Vital Statistics
The LG VX-8500 Chocolate weighs just 3.53 ounces and measures 3.80 x 1.88 x .69 inches. Its lithium-ion battery is rated at up to 3.5 hours of digital talk time, and up to 384 hours of digital standby time. It runs on the CDMA 850/CDMA 1900 frequencies. The phone comes with a one-year limited warranty.

Note: The LG Chocolate supports the Headset, Handsfree, Serial Port, Dial Up Networking, Advanced Audio Distribution, and Object Push for vCard. It does not support all Bluetooth object transfer (OBEX) profiles

Customer Reviews

Pretty phone but doesn't live up to hype
I really wanted to like this phone. The look of it is very sharp and the screen is nice and clear, with great graphics. It's small and fits well in the palm of my hand. The interface is slick and intuitive. It has a decent internal memory (60 MB) as well as supporting microSD cards. Most quibbles were minor enough to ignore (like button sensitivity). I liked almost everything except the reason I bought it. More on that shortly.

Some minor gripes:
As has been mentioned in other reviews, the interface is always a little touchy in some way, particularly the OK button, even after adjusting the sensitivity.

I'm not sure if this is an LG decision or Verizon, but the phone isn't fully capable out of the box. They advertise a music phone, but in order to be able to use it to its full capacity you'll need to get their Music Essentials kit for another 30 bucks, and all you get is a proprietary USB cable and some mediocre headphones. Anyone who buys Nokia phones knows this stuff is almost always included, especially if it's proprietary or required for specific features on the phone (like playing music).

The main reason for purchasing this phone, however, was to have a remote storage device along with being able to play MP3s. My previous phone was a Nokia 3300, which was billed as an MP3 phone, and worked great for that. I could put in a memory card, plug the USB into the computer, and it pops up as a removeable disk, and i could copy files to and from the phone like any other USB thumb/flash drive, no special software required (not even drivers, depending on the OS). This is great for me, because I work and go to school and am constantly shuffling files back and forth between the two and home. The Chocolate does not offer that versatility.

The only way you can copy stuff to the Choclate is using a sync feature via Windows Media Player 10; it does now show up in Windows Explorer when the USB is plugged in. That means the only thing you can copy to the phone is music, so no using it for portable storage. Also, the phone doesn't seem to accept anything except CBR mp3s, preferably ripped by Windows Media Player. Given that I've accumulated over 1000 CDs over the years and have ripped them using various methods with various software, most of my collection won't transfer. The only solution from Verizon's support (who know very little about the phone, I might add) was to re-rip everything using WMP. This is an unacceptable solution, especially since my Nokia would play just about anything I threw at it.

Also annoying, you can't use any of your MP3s as ringtones. I briefly tried the bitpim software, but the Chocolate isn't supported yet and there were various minor issues, most notably it didn't seem to recognize the memory card I purchased for the phone, only the internal memory. Bottom line is I shouln't have to rely on 3rd party software to hack my own phone to get it to work the way i want it.

Perhaps Nokia has spoiled me. No doubt some will say that means I'm just closed-minded, but I've had my 3300 for some time now and it's worked great. Everything was intuitive and versatile. Nokia doesn't intentionally gimp their products like Motorola's SLVR (why iTunes? gah!) or LG's Chocolate.

In short, if you're just looking for a flashy, stylish phone the LG Chocolate fits the bill nicely. Just don't expect it to be the great media player it's been advertised to be. And certainly don't count on it as a remote storage device.

MP3 ringtones
If you get this phone, it's definitely important to buy Verizon's Music Essentials Kit as well. It comes with a headset, a USB cable, and drivers for the cable. Then you can upload MP3s from your collection using Windows Media Player, although the phone only holds 60MB of music without a MicroSD card. But also, if you download the free open-source software BitPim from bitpim dot org, you can create your own MP3 ringtones and also backup your pix and phonebook. For now, BitPim has to be set manually to LG VX8300 until it has support for the VX8500.

All in one answers
I hope this review helps some people as the reviews I read while also doing some google searches along the way helped me to configure the LG Chocolate and get it to work the best way it can for me from the way it comes out of the box.

First of all let me say that now that I have worked out some of the issues I had with this phone I absolutely love it and will have many hours of enjoyment with music, photos, rigtones, etc, etc.

1) I have seen many posts regarding battery life. The best way to save some battery life if you are not using V-Cast is to hit 0 after you enter the menu screen and then six 0's as service code. Under 1. Mode preference scroll down to 1X only. This disables the V-Cast ev-do network which puts a drain on your battery as it continually searches for the signal. If you use V-Cast you can always disable it and then just turn it back on when you are using it.

2) I have read that some people were unable to get certain songs to sync to the phone while others worked fine. By looking at the songs I had an issue with I noticed they all had a bit rate of VBR 200 something. I used an MP3 ripper to make them 128 KBPS and then tried those songs again in the syncing phase and what do you know. That was the issue. Apparently the player does not support certain bit rates. I am still trying to find a good free ripper but there are literaly hundreds of them out there and anyone of them usually offers two week trials that can at least fix your current files and an added plus is that this process compresses the file even further saving memory space while not decreasing quality in any way in my opinion.

3) ID3 tags don't work for mp3. Well I also have heard of this being a big issue and had the problem after the first time I ran a sync. ID3 tags are the coding that allows your music to sort in nice categories like artist, genre, album etc. When the player doesn't read them properly the entire filename just simply raps around in the song title line. This is happening as I found out because the player only reads ID3 V1 and does not support ID3 V2. It's silly in my opinion that a new product comes out of the box like this but there is a quick fix. A simple program called ID3 Kill can be downloaded in a few seconds. Just run the program and check off ID3 V2 and click go after selecting your music folder. This process does not change the way your files are viewed on your computer or do any damage to the files. If you format your memory card and do the sync process over again after this process you will find 85% of the files will be fixed and now sorted. For the remaining 15% it's probably just the way I have my ID3 V1 tags configured and I'm no expert in the field and will just deal with it like this.

4) Ringtones. Everyone loves ringtones but they can be expensive if you really like them a lot and want to change them all the time. Well now along with your USB cable that you get with music essentials and a free program called bitpim that you can download you are able to upload your current mp3 music to your ringtone folder. It's really simple as all you need to do is select the song, do a quick edit to make it about 30 seconds long and hit send. It's free, quick, and easy. Bitpim also allows you to send all kinds of other files from your PC to the phone like contact lists, pix, etc. Oh, and just select the VX8300 as the phone since they don't have VX8500 on there. Apparently they are very similar and it works fine.

5) Finally here is an added plus. It has nothing to do with the phone at all but a friend of mine found this site which I will note I get nothing for promoting them but I want to share because it can save people a ton of money. The website [...]sells music for .10 - .15 a track. I have used it for about six months and feel it's a fantastic deal. Songs download in seconds and are of great quality. I have even seen albums loaded on the site shortly before they are released in stores.

Hopefully this is all helpful. It took me a couple days but I finally got my Chocolate working sweet!! Enjoy.