LG KG800 Chocolate review: Dressed to impress

A steady hand does miracles

The camera has a 1.3 megapixel matrix and offers resolutions of up to 1280x960 pixels. The camera application itself is rather slow and it takes above 10 seconds in order to fire it up, take a shot at the maximum resolution and save it.

Using the display as a camera viewfinder

There is a LED flash which is there to help you in poor light conditions. Speaking of poor light conditions, the camera has a night mode which does it job very well and compared to night modes in similar cameras produces relatively low photo noise. It offers 4x digital zoom which is not available at the maximum resolution though but this is not that great of a loss since it produces a mere crop & resize of the original image. The camera menu offers option such as picture resolution, brightness level, the white balance that has several presets according to the available light conditions, and some color effects such as sepia, black & white, negative, etc. The camera has some interesting shoot modes besides the regular still shot and those are Multi shoot mode and Frame mode. Multi shots are only available when the pixel resolution is set to 320 x 240 or 640 x 480, while the Frame shots are only available with the pixel resolution set to 176 x 220 which is the display resolution in fact.

Various camera settings

Otherwise the picture quality is fine if you managed to hold the phone perfectly still during image capturing. As we already said, the camera is awfully slow. There is a delay between the press of the button and the actual capturing of the photo. That means that most of the time the composition you want to take a shot at has already changed when the actual photographing takes place. Generally, you are could be easily misled by the long time it takes the camera to make the picture and deciding that it should have already taken the picture you could move a bit. That way you would turn the picture into an unrecognizable blur.

An interesting thing is that the camera view finder, similar to that of Samsung D600 we should add, doesn't display the full picture that the camera actually takes. In a way the viewfinder somewhat zooms the image and the left and right sides of the picture are cut outside the viewable area. You can only see the whole picture after you take it and save it.

Generally speaking the camera is not very user friendly and its usability suffers from the shutter lag and the cropped image view finder.

LG KG800 Chocolate sample photos

Two low light samples • well lit scene vs. using flash in complete darkness

The camera also captures video in maximum resolution of 176 x 144 pixels and the output format is the usual .3gp. The menu of the video camera is pretty much the same as the one we already described for the still camera with few exceptions. It offers both limited and unlimited recording.

Video samples

USB driving license

The phone features full USB support and the LG USB cable comes along in the retail box along with the phone itself. The great thing about the USB support of the phone is that when connected it appears in the Windows explorer as a removable drive just as your regular USB flash drive would and no drivers are needed. If you receive a call whilst in mass storage mode, the call will be rejected but after you disconnect the handset, you will see the information about any missed calls.

Standby display while in USB drive mode

Opening the Removable drive allows you access to the Music, Photos, Videos, Text and Others folders. The Others folder is used for general file storage. You can upload any kind of files here - images, audio, or even files not specifically supported by the phone when you just want to carry them with you and download them later to another PC. Once again when saving content to the phone don't create subfolders since those won't be recognized and read by the phone file system. Interesting enough, the Photos folder is reserved for the pictures taken using the phone's camera and the access to it should be used only to transfer the pictures taken from the phone to the PC. Even though photos may be uploaded to this folder from the PC, they will not be available on the phone's photo album or Photos folder even if those pictures are the same ones you downloaded a minute ago.

If you need any other type of synchronization between the phone and the PC like for items such as the phonebook and the schedule you should use the dedicated LG software LGPCSync that comes on CD along with the phone.

Who needs mobile Internet?

As much as connectivity is concerned, the phone features 3-band GSM 900/1800/1900 and GPRS support for fast data transfers. It also features Bluetooth with the following profiles: Headset, Handsfree Kit, File Transfer, Image printing, Dial-up networking, Business card transfer, Browsing other devices, and Serial port profile.

The integrated WAP browser doesn't have full HTML support and managed to open only simple HTML pages such as Google. It's a regular WAP browser used in older phones and its presence here makes us think that again the sell point of the LG Chocolate phone definitely won't be its multimedia or connectivity capabilities.

The clumsy browser