LG Chocolate Touch VX8575 (Verizon Wireless)

The good: The LG Chocolate Touch has a great music player, a 3.2-megapixel camera, GPS, EV-DO, a 3.5mm headset jack, and a responsive touch screen.

The bad: The LG Chocolate Touch has a disappointing browser, and the overall look and feel of the phone is nothing we haven't seen before.

The bottom line: Despite our issues with the browser and the uninteresting design, the LG Chocolate Touch is a terrific music phone for Verizon Wireless.

When the LG Chocolate first came into the scene with the VX8500 model back in 2006, it was preceded by a ton of hype. And such is the case with its fourth and most recent incarnation, the LG Chocolate Touch. As the name indicates, it is a touch-screen phone with the famous Chocolate branding, and so we were expecting to see a brand new design and upgraded features.

As it turned out, LG actually introduced two Chocolate models with touch screens. The first is the LG Chocolate BL40, which features a cinematic 21:9 aspect ... Expand full review

When the LG Chocolate first came into the scene with the VX8500 model back in 2006, it was preceded by a ton of hype. And such is the case with its fourth and most recent incarnation, the LG Chocolate Touch. As the name indicates, it is a touch-screen phone with the famous Chocolate branding, and so we were expecting to see a brand new design and upgraded features.

As it turned out, LG actually introduced two Chocolate models with touch screens. The first is the LG Chocolate BL40, which features a cinematic 21:9 aspect ratio, multitouch capabilities, a 5-megapixel camera, and a bevy of impressive features. Unfortunately, it's available only in European and Asian markets (you can read our review of the LG Chocolate BL40 at CNET UK), so we had to settle for the LG Chocolate Touch VX8575, which is far less impressive.

Even so, Verizon Wireless's Chocolate Touch remains a decent phone. It's slim and lightweight, with a beautiful touch display that's surprisingly responsive. Like all the other Chocolate handsets, the Touch is a music-centric phone, with features like Dolby Mobile equalizer settings, an FM radio, and even a virtual drum kit. Combined with a 3.2-megapixel camera, EV-DO, and a full HTML browser, the Chocolate Touch VX8575 is a great music phone for Verizon Wireless customers. Just don't expect anything new in terms of design. The LG Chocolate Touch VX8575 is $79.99 with a two-year service agreement from Verizon Wireless.

Design
On the face of it, the LG Chocolate Touch VX8575 is similar to other LG touch-screen phones that we've reviewed, like the LG Vu and the LG Dare. Measuring 4.3 inches long by 2.2 inches wide by 0.47 inch thick, the Chocolate Touch is rectangular with slightly rounded edges. It is encased in a very reflective shell, save for four geometric shapes on its back side that are covered in a soft touch material. You get two changeable back plates with the phone: one with black shapes, and the other with purple. The reflective part of the phone is so shiny that you can use it as a mirror.

The LG Chocolate Touch VX8575 has geometric shapes on the back.

The 3.0-inch display is vibrant and colorful, thanks to 262,000-color support and 400x240 pixel resolution. It really shows off the drop shadows and color gradients of the graphics. You can adjust the backlight time, the charging screen (what shows on the display when the phone is charging), the clock format on the home screen, the menu font style, and the dial font size.

On the right side of the Touch's home screen are two shortcut icons, which you can choose to hide if you wish. They correspond to a shortcut bin, and the music player shortcut. When you tap the arrow for the shortcut bin, you'll see a pullout menu of application and media file shortcuts, which you can drag and drop to the home screen. Some shortcuts are also full-on widgets, like those for the clock, the calendar, and the memo pad. You can add and remove shortcuts easily from the pullout menu as well. Along the bottom row of the home screen are shortcuts to the messaging in-box, the phone dialer, the main menu, the contacts list, and the favorite contacts screen.

On the whole, the touch screen is quite responsive. We like the haptics vibration feedback, though you also can add a sound effect to let you know your touch has registered. You can adjust the length and intensity of the vibration, and there's also a touch calibration wizard to help ensure accuracy. It does take a bit to get used to the touch screen, though; sometimes we activated something when we just wanted to scroll down a list.

The Touch VX8575 has an internal accelerometer that will rotate the screen from portrait to landscape mode as you turn the phone in your hand. Keep in mind that it works only in certain applications, like the Web browser. What's more, when you rotate the phone to landscape mode while in the text messaging app, you'll see a full QWERTY keyboard. The virtual keyboard is quite easy to use. The keys magnify as you tap them, and there's a dedicated @ key that double as a ".com" key when you hit shift. You also can enter text in portrait mode via a nine-key alphanumeric keypad or via handwriting recognition, but we much prefer the full QWERTY keyboard.

The LG Chocolate Touch VX8575 has strangely shaped keys underneath the display.

Underneath the display are three physical keys: Send, Clear, and End/Power. The Clear key doubles as the voice record with a long press. The keys are shaped like amorphous blobs, which complement the geometric shapes on the back of the phone. On the left side of the phone are the charger jack, the volume control, and the speakerphone key. A 3.5mm headset jack is on the top and the camera key, the music player key, and the screen lock key are on the right side. On the back is the camera lens. The microSD card slot is located behind the battery cover.

Features
The LG Chocolate Touch VX8575 has a generous 1,000-entry phone book with room in each entry for five numbers, two e-mail addresses, an instant-messaging user name, and a street address. You can also organize your contacts into groups, and pair them with a photo and any of 21 polyphonic ringtones. Other basics include a vibrate mode, a speakerphone (which you can activate prior to a call), threaded text and multimedia messaging, voice messaging, a calendar, an alarm clock, a world clock, a stopwatch, a notepad, a calculator, a tip calculator, and a drawing pad, which you can use to make sketches for multimedia messages.

The Touch VX8575 also boasts a "Social Network Shortcut Key," which opens a menu that you can populate with shortcuts for updating your status or photo on a variety of social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. These aren't real applications; they're just a way for you to quickly update your social network via SMS or MMS.

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More advanced features include USB mass storage, voice command dialing, and a variety of Bluetooth profiles like hands-free, dial-up networking, A2DP or stereo, file transfer, and more. And if you're willing to cough up $3 a month for it, you'll also get Verizon's Visual Voice Mail.

The Touch offers three e-mail options: mobile e-mail, corporate e-mail--and calendar syncing--through RemoSync, and mobile Web email, which just gives you quick browser access to popular Web e-mail sites like Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. The phone also has GPS with VZ Navigator support, and the EV-DO support brings V Cast video streaming.

The star feature of the phone, however, is the music player. We're happy to see that it has its own interface and doesn't just copy the look of the V Cast Music store. It organizes songs into artists, albums, and genres, and you can create and edit your own playlists. The player interface has the album art in the middle and the player controls along the bottom. You can set songs on repeat or shuffle as well. To load songs on the Touch, you can either purchase tunes directly from the V Cast Music store or sync with the PC using the V Cast Music with Rhapsody software. If you have a Rhapsody account, you can sync subscribed tracks as well. You don't need the software to load the songs though; you can just drag and drop them to the microSD card.

The main attraction of the music player on the Touch VX8575 is the Dolby Mobile equalizer. There are five equalizer presets (Flat, Bass Boost, Treble Boost, Vocal Boost, and Classical), plus a manual equalizer if you really want it customized. A few extra player features include a visualizer effect, plus a "rhythmical beat" option that makes the phone vibrate along to the song. Our favorite, however, is the "Join the Band" option that brings up a full drum kit or a scrolling 88-key keyboard for you to play along to the music. It's not very useful perhaps, but it's a lot of fun to play. Other music player options include an FM radio with 12 presets (it only works when you plug in a wired headset) and integrated song ID.

The LG Chocolate Touch VX8575 has a 3.2-megapixel camera on the back.

The Chocolate Touch also has a 3.2-megapixel camera, which can take pictures in five resolutions (2,048x1,536, 1,600x1,200, 1,280x960, 800x480, 640x480), five white balance presets, and five color effects. It has three focusing modes, a self-timer, and special shot modes like Panorama and Intelligent shot. Photo quality is quite good overall. We didn't like the low-light shots due to the lack of flash, but images do look sharp and colorful for the most part.

The LG Chocolate Touch takes pretty good photos.

There's also a full HTML browser, which isn't as full featured as we would like. It lets us surf and browse full Web pages, and we like that you can view them in full-screen mode, add bookmarks, search through a page, and zoom in and out with the volume rocker or an onscreen magnifying glass. But the Web search function on the browser only uses the Microsoft Bing service, and whenever you want to enter a URL, you have to keep going back to a URL-entry page.

You can personalize the Chocolate Touch with graphics and ringtones. If you're not satisfied with the options on the phone, you can download more from the Verizon Wireless store. The Touch comes with two games--Rock Band and Sims 3--and you can get more games and applications via the mobile Web browser as well.

Performance
We tested the LG Chocolate Touch in San Francisco using Verizon Wireless. Call quality was impressive on the whole. Callers could hear us loudly and clearly for the most part. They did hear a slight fuzziness in the background and they said our voice quality was a bit harsh, but those were not deal breakers.

On our end, we could hear them clearly without any interference. Their voice sounded quite natural as well. Speakerphone calls fared similarly; they said they could hear us with plenty of volume and with a slight echo effect, but nothing terribly distracting. On our end, the speakerphone had plenty of volume, and though the callers' voices didn't sound as natural, we could still carry on a conversation just fine.

We really liked the audio quality of the Chocolate Touch. Of course, the speakers didn't really do justice to the music, but even without a headset, you could hear the difference of each equalizer setting quite clearly. You do really need a headset to fully enjoy the bass boost setting though.

We were pleased with the EV-DO Rev. 0 speeds too. It's not quite as fast as EV-DO Rev. A, but we still managed to download a 2.08MB song in around 40 seconds, and we loaded the CNET front page in about 25 seconds. We also managed to stream videos from V Cast with little to no buffering. The streaming video quality was mediocre at best, with a lot of pixelation and blurriness.

The LG Chocolate Touch has a rated battery life of 5.1 hours talk time and 19.6 days standby time. It has a slightly longer talk time in our tests with 6 hours and 52 minutes. According to FCC radiation tests, the Chocolate Touch has a digital SAR of 1.47 watts per kilogram.

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LG Rumor Touch - blue (Sprint)

The good: The LG Rumor Touch has a unique text-messaging-friendly interface, plus it has a five-row QWERTY keyboard. It also has EV-DO Rev. 0, GPS, stereo Bluetooth, a 3.5mm headset jack, e-mail, and easy access to social network sites. Call quality is great as well.

The bad: The LG Rumor Touch's keyboard layout could be improved, and the photo quality is average.

The bottom line: The LG Rumor Touch is a touch-screen messaging phone from Sprint with a user interface that makes text messaging a breeze.

Long before messaging phones became a trend, LG has been making feature phones with full QWERTY keyboards. Verizon has its line of Voyager and enV handsets, and Sprint has the LG Rumor and the subsequent LG Rumor 2. Though they made decent messaging phones, the previous Rumor handsets were more for the entry-level consumer due to their basic feature sets.

The LG Rumor Touch changes all that, however; it is the first touch-screen phone to bear the Rumor branding, and it carries a slew of improved features. Not only that, but the Rumor Touch carries a unique user interface that ... Expand full review

Long before messaging phones became a trend, LG has been making feature phones with full QWERTY keyboards. Verizon has its line of Voyager and enV handsets, and Sprint has the LG Rumor and the subsequent LG Rumor 2. Though they made decent messaging phones, the previous Rumor handsets were more for the entry-level consumer due to their basic feature sets.

The LG Rumor Touch changes all that, however; it is the first touch-screen phone to bear the Rumor branding, and it carries a slew of improved features. Not only that, but the Rumor Touch carries a unique user interface that seems tailor made for sending and receiving text messages. Its impressive feature set includes a 2-megapixel camera, a 3.5mm headset jack, GPS, and EV-DO Rev. 0. The Rumor Touch is available now for $79.99 with a new two-year service agreement with Sprint.

Design
When we first saw the LG Rumor Touch at CES 2010, we'll admit we were slightly underwhelmed. The design just reminded us so much of the LG Xenon that we were hard-pressed to be excited about it. Looking at it now however, we see it is actually not too bad. Measuring 4.2 inches long by 2.2 inches wide by 0.6 inch thick, the Rumor Touch has a straightforward rectangular shape with slightly curved sides and a soft touch back cover. At 4.7 ounces, it feels nice and solid in the hand without being too heavy.

The LG Rumor Touch has a 3-inch display.

As the name suggests, the Rumor Touch has a large 3-inch touch screen display on the front. It is capable of showing 262,000 colors and holds a 240 x 400-pixel WQVGA resolution, which results in a vibrant display with crisp text and images. You can adjust the brightness, the backlight time, and the font size. The touch screen is resistive so you can either use a stylus or your fingertips to navigate. It doesn't feel as smooth as a capacitive display, but it's not any slower than other resistive screens we've tried. You can add haptic feedback if you want the phone to vibrate whenever you select something and there's a touch calibration wizard if you want better touch precision. Underneath the display are three physical controls--the back key, the home screen key, and the Call key.

The user interface on the Rumor Touch is unlike most other touch screen phones we've tried. The welcome screen area is quite blank, except for the date, time, battery, and signal strength information on the top bar and a single shortcut to the home screen on the bottom. However, whenever you get new incoming text messages, you will see a small bubble icon on the upper right with a number that indicates how many you received. When you select that icon, all your new messages will appear as floating bubbles, filling up the normally empty welcome screen. From there you can either close them out or start replying to your messages. We thought this bubble interface idea is quite a clever one, especially if you're a big messaging fanatic.

When you select the home screen, you will find a simple list view of frequently used applications. You can easily customize this by adding and removing shortcuts. The main menu is presented in exactly the same boring list layout--we would've preferred some kind of variety here to differentiate the two zones. Still, at least it was easy enough to navigate to the features we wanted.

Another specialty that sets the Rumor Touch apart from other phones is the Hello UI, or Hello User Interface. It's accessible via the Contacts list and is essentially a smart way of grouping up your contacts. There are four colored dots on the left hand side, and each corresponds to a different group. To add a contact to a group, simply select the add symbol and choose a contact from your address book. The contact will then be represented on the Hello UI as a cartoon character--you can change this to one of 12 included characters or you can select your own picture to represent him or her.

You can add up to six contacts per group. From there you can drag and drop the icons around or you can snap them to a grid if you like. When you select an individual contact, a circle of shortcuts will appear around the image. They lead to a new text message, the most recent text conversation with him or her, a speed dial to that person, plus quick access to the contacts list. Perhaps the coolest thing you can do with the Hello UI is that you can draw a "lasso" around all the contacts in a particular group to send all of them a group text message.

To get to the number dial pad, you have to press the Call key. The virtual dial pad has large numbers so you can easily dial without messing up. There are also shortcuts to a new text message, the recent calls list, the phone book, and the aforementioned Hello UI. As for sending a text message, you can do so via the touch screen with either handwriting recognition or a T9 keypad. There's no virtual QWERTY keyboard, but that doesn't bother us because the Rumor Touch has a full physical keyboard.

The LG Rumor Touch has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard.

The keyboard slides sideways to the right of the phone, which will then prompt the display to change from portrait to landscape mode. If you are doing this from standby, you'll be presented with the messaging menu the second you slide out the keyboard so you can get started on typing out texts straightaway. The keyboard is quite spacious--it is a five-row keyboard, which gives it one row just for numbers. The keys are raised above the surface in a smooth bubble shape so it's easy to text by feeling your way around. However, the Back, Enter, and arrow keys take up just a tad too much space on the right, which throws off our natural thumb typing position. It therefore takes a little slower to type out texts than we would like.

On the left spine of the Rumor Touch are the volume rocker and camera key, and the 3.5mm headset jack, the Power/Screen lock key, and the microSD card slot are on the right. The charger jack is on the bottom and the camera lens sits on the back next to the external speaker.

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Features
The LG Rumor Touch has a 600-entry address book and you can add up to seven phone numbers per entry. You can also add an e-mail address, an instant messenger handle, a web URL, a street address, a birthday, a memo, a job title, and a company name. You can also customize each entry with a photo for caller ID, one of 33 polyphonic ringtones, or one of four vibration types. Other basic features include a vibrate mode, a speakerphone, text and multimedia messaging, a world clock, a calendar, a calculator, and a notepad. For the slightly more advanced, the phone also has stereo Bluetooth, GPS with Sprint Navigation support, USB mass storage mode, voice command, wireless backup, and a document viewer.

Since messaging takes center stage on the Rumor Touch, we like that the phone supports threaded text messaging so you can easily view a back and forth conversation. Aside from that, you also get mobile e-mail, which supports AOL, Gmail, Windows Live, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, as well as your own personal and work e-mail. You also get quick access to social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace via dedicated apps.

The Rumor Touch comes with EV-DO Rev. 0, which also gives it access to Sprint's 3G services like Sprint TV, which lets you watch live TV and on-demand video, and the Sprint Music Store, which lets you purchase and download songs over-the-air for only 99 cents per track. The music player has a rather simple interface--you can set songs on repeat or shuffle, and you can create and edit playlists on the fly. The Rumor Touch has 52MB of internal memory but it has a 32GB microSD card capacity for additional storage.

There's also a HTML browser on here, which makes full use of the nice 3-inch display. It's not a super advanced browser--there's no tabbed browsing and you can't access your browser history--but you can change the font size, add bookmarks, turn the images on or off, and you can set Google as your default search option.

The LG Rumor Touch has a 2-megapixel camera on the back.

The 2.0-megapixel camera can take pictures in four resolutions and three quality settings. Other settings include brightness, white balance, color tone, fun frames, a self-timer, and up to 2x digital zoom when not at the largest resolution. Photo quality was average--though the images seemed sharp enough, they often looked overcast with a slight orange tinge when in low light. There's also a built-in camcorder--it can record videos in shorter video mail lengths or longer for-storage lengths, and in one of three resolutions. Other camcorder settings are similar to the still camera.

The LG Rumor Touch takes mediocre photos.

After taking your photos and videos, you can choose to share them via Sprint's Picture and Video Sharing service. You can share them with multiple friends and family members, and you can upload them to Photobucket, Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube.

As for personalizing the phone, you can change out the wallpaper or screensaver on the welcome screen and you can download new ringtones--or record your own if you feel like it. The phone comes with a few games and apps: NFL Mobile Live, NASCAR Sprint Cup Mobile, and demo versions of Family Feud, Midnight Bowling 2, and The Sims 3.

Performance
We tested the LG Rumor Touch in San Francisco using Sprint's service. Call quality was quite impressive on the whole. On our end, we could hear our callers crystal clear without any harsh voice tones or crackly static. It was the same when we were outdoors or indoors.

Callers reported similarly great call quality. They said there was plenty of volume and we sounded really smooth and natural, almost that of landline quality. However, they said that our voice sounded a little muffled when in speakerphone mode. For us, they sounded just fine on the speakerphone--a little echoed, perhaps, but that's normal.

We found the 3G speeds to be quite adequate. We downloaded a 1.6MB song in around 30 seconds and loaded the mobile CNET page in just 22 seconds. Sprint's live TV service looked surprisingly good--action sequences did not suffer from a lot of pixilation. Music quality was OK--we would recommend using a pair of stereo headphones for better audio fidelity.

The LG Rumor Touch has a rated battery life of 7 hours talk time. It has a tested talk time of 6 hours and 51 minutes. According to the FCC, it has a digital SAR of 1.2 watts per kilogram.

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