LG Chocolate VX8550 Cell Phone Review - Messaging
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Mark Brezinski Published on July 27, 2007 Comment on this |
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Supported E-mail Services (0.0)
Push E-mail (0.0)
Inadequate e-mail support, see above.
Multiple E-mail Accounts (0.0)
Inadequate e-mail support, see above.
HTML and Attachments (0.0)
Inadequate e-mail support, see above.
E-mail Customizations (0.0)
Inadequate e-mail support, see above.
Time to a New Message (0.0)
Inadequate e-mail support, see above.
E-mail Usability (0.0)
Inadequate e-mail support, see above.
Supported IM Services (0.0)
The LG Chocolate includes an instant messaging client. You can choose from the AOL, MSN, and Yahoo IM services. We were pleased to see you could have all three running simultaneously, but you should remember that this client sends messages through an SMS gateway, so you will end up paying for an SMS message for every instant message you type. We don't award points for this, as it is way too easy to inadvertently rack up a large bill with a couple of IM conversations.
MMS Support (5.0)
As with its predecessor, the LG Chocolate divides MMS messaging into picture messages and video messages. Again, text messages are separate, meaning you can't write a normal text and later attach a photo or video. Selecting an attachment is the same as checking a box in the photo/video album. In fact, you can initiate a photo/video message from their respective albums. Once you've captured an image or picture, you can send it immediately. You can also compose a message and then capture media. These are all good options, but maintaining separated MMS capabilities (TXT, pictures, video) is an odd choice for LG and Verizon. Other phones, such as the Treo 700p and the Nokia N73, are capable of handling MMS and SMS functions together.
SMS Smiley Face Interpretation (2.0)
The LG Chocolate still has many built-in, small graphics you can send via SMS. In the library are a few smiley faces. Again, however, the Chocolate does not interpret smilies sent from others. This is probably because the smiley faces were just part of a large folder of pictures. Nothing from that folder is linked to character combinations within the text, so it won't know to replace a ":)" with a smiley face.
SMS/MMS Ease of Use (5.0)
The interface to send SMS/MMS is easy enough to use, if somewhat clumsy. There are fields for inserting the picture/video, a sound, a name card, and a subject. Editing a field is where the d-pad's scroll wheel can become annoying. When trying to navigate around a text field with the d-pad, we often accidentally spun the wheel, causing either the above or below window to become the active one. Again, this is just a little annoying, nothing major; you just have to scroll back to the field you want to type in. Another slightly irksome feature is the MMS/SMS menu itself. The old Chocolate labeled its texting options, "TXT Msg", "PIX Msg", and "FLIX Msg" respectively. The new Chocolate has done away with every abbreviation except for "TXT". Maintaining only the smallest abbreviation is visually jarring; it always looks like a typo in the software.
Browsing drafts or archived messages is fairly intuitive. Messages are initially thumbnails, displaying the phone number/contact ID of the sender/recipient, the first line of the message, and a small icon depicting if it was a TXT, Picture, or Video message. Selecting a thumbnail displays the full message, in the same format as the sending SMS/MMS interface.
Time to a New SMS Message (3.83)
For this test, we place the phone in the closed, unlocked position, then time how long it takes to open a new SMS dialogue. The LG Chocolate took an average of 2.61 seconds to do this, which was 0.11 seconds faster than the old model. This is a good time; the Razr V3m took 4.6 seconds, the Nokia N73 took 4.28 seconds, and the Sanyo M1 took 2.67 seconds. The Chocolate's time was helped by a shortcut to messaging on the home screen. The touch buttons slowed us down, as they remain locked for a fraction of a second after the phone is open. If you hit them during this time, they remain locked until they aren't pressed for a length of time. If you jump the gun, the Chocolate's time could worsen up to three seconds.
| Cell Phone | Time (sec) | Score |
| LG Chocolate VX8550 | 2.61 | 3.83 |
| Sanyo M1 | 2.67 | 3.75 |
| Motorola Razr V3m | 4.58 | 2.18 |
| LG Chocolate VX8500 | 2.72 | 3.68 |
| Nokia N75 | 1.84 | 5.43 |
| LG Shine KE970 | 3.10 | 3.23 |
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