LG Chocolate KG800 user reviews

Tony McCauley 16 October 2006

Good: The looks

Bad: It is a poor phone.

Comment: A beauty without brains. Can you live with it?

I brought this phone on impulse for its outstanding feature: it looks so good. Unfortunately this is its only outstanding feature, but what a beauty it is. On seeing this my wife made me buy her one as well but we both are not too happy with them.

Like most people on this site I am a gadget freak, but when it comes to phones my requirements are very simple and this is where this phone falls down. The call quality / reception seem poor and as for 'ease of use', well there isn't any. I know people will say I should RTFM but I don't know if there actually is a voice dial facility. The camera quality seems good, but it is slow and awkward to start and so not good for those impulsive snaps. My main gripe is with the Bluetooth which I have failed to get set up on either my PDA (Palm Tx) or my laptop, which is also an LG (T1). The latter is a huge disappointment as a major buying point was that it matched the phone and I expected full functionality and this is a fatal flaw for me.

So can I live with it? Well I would swap back in a heartbeat for my previous phone, a Black V3, but I gave that to my daughter, so for work and general use I still use my Ericsson T39m, one of the all-time great phones, however I guess it must be like having a mistress or a trophy wife, whenever I want to impress or get a lift from the guilty pleasure of being seen with such a beauty, the SIM gets swapped and out she comes. So it's a shallow phone for a shallow man, but it still makes me smile, well unless my wife reads this ;-)

Anonymous 11 October 2006

Good: Very stylish design

Bad: Short battery life

Comment: The LG KG800 is an excellent phone, with loads of features. However, the battery life is too short, and the touch sensitive keys are too sensitive... http://www.best-mobile-phones.org/review/3-lg-kg800-chocolate

Oliver Smith 13 September 2006

Good: Looks, sliding mechanism, infrared touchpad, format of keys

Bad: Easy to get fingerprints on, no expandable memory slot, poor camera

Comment: This is a great phone, particularly if you prefer looks to functionality. The problem with this phone is that all of its media components are fairly outdated in comparison to other phones today. However, the 1.3-megapixel camera and MP3 player satisfy my needs so I love this phone.

Jen Walker 13 September 2006

Good: I love the appearance, the red glow, the IDEA of touch screen and the sliding mechanism.

Bad: The text writing function is horrific. You either have to use all capitals, or all lower case, there's no function to change to change to capitals after a full stop or to lower case after a capital letter. Its enough to have made me not buy the phone. Writing messages is generally hard, as the buttons are hard to press once you get used to the light touch-screen controls, and I'm constantly not getting the right letter and ending up with incoherent messages. Also the touch screen controls are a bit iffy in general, taking you to the wrong menus far too easily, accidentally deleting a message you've just spent 10 minutes writing because the keypad is so hard to use. The shape of the keypad requires my thumb to bend in an uncomfortable way. The camera on the phone is absolutey awful, compared to my old Sony Ericsson K750i which produced pictures of an amazing quality. It didn't accept some of the pictures that I tried to Bluetooth over from my old phone, so I'm guessing that it doesn't accept that many file formats, and last but not least (I'm sure I'll think of more faults once I'm done) the computer software doesn't even work, it wouldn't recognise the phone at all. Complete waste of time!

Comment: Very swish and nice looking. Don't buy if you're intending to take photos for anything other than use on the camera and definitely DO NOT buy if you like to use a mixture of capitals and lower case to write coherent text messages (GRR!) That little fault absolutely ruins this phone for me. And don't buy if you generally have low patience levels, as the touch-screen controls will piss you off.

Wish I hadn't bought this phone. My old Sony Ericsson K750i beats it a million times over.

Rachel Still 6 September 2006

Good: The touch screen, the buffer thingy, MP3, USB link to computer

Bad: When the touch screen doesn't work imediately, the finger prints, lack of memory, the fact that the PC hardware didn't work

Comment: I think the phone is brill but it could do with a bit more memory and being made less easily scratchable

shawn shawn91 12 August 2006

Good: everything except

Bad: Windows Media Player does not read my phone when I try to sync it to my pc can any body help me w/ tht

shawn shawn91 12 August 2006

Good: almost everything except...

Bad: when i go to sync my phone windows media player dose not read my phone how can i resolve this

Darren McCorry 8 August 2006

Good: Everything, mostly the design

Bad: Nothing really - message tones could be louder, that is my only niggle.

Comment: A beautiful phone that has style and substance. While the Samsung E900 has a slightly higher specified feature set, few would argue that the Chocolate is the more beautiful of the two - having used both before deciding which to buy, the Chocolate felt much more solid, where the Samsung felt slightly rushed in terms of assembly.
There is nothing I would change about the Chocolate, it is truly a perfect phone. You need to treat yourself to this phone; I did, and I absolutely love it.

Dean Stanton 22 July 2006

Good: Design, light weight, does most things a phone should do in a compact and attractive form factor

Bad: No memory expansion capability, mp3 playback disappointing, tinny speaker, no speakerphone, T9 input is very, very frustrating

Comment: This is undoubtedly a desirable handset.

Teaches Nokia and even Samsung a few lessons on how to design/build slide handsets, particularly on the quality front too. Beats all but maybe the 8800 from Nokia on build quality, at least so far...

Critically lacks memory expansion capability - all other drawbacks, apart from maybe the idiotic T9, can be lived with, but memory is a crucial problem. My old Sony Walkman W800i handset, and the next generation just months (weeks?) away, walk all over it for multimedia capability.

It's a great achievement and a real leap forward for LG, and it's very pleasing to see that they have been rewarded with international sales success, as well as runaway sales in their home market. If they can do something about memory expansion and possibly improve the camera at the same time, the evolution of the KG800 will be unbeatable if both style and substance are important to you.