LG Chocolate VX8550 Cell Phone Review - Multimedia
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Mark Brezinski Published on July 27, 2007 Comment on this |
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Accessing Music Software (9.8)
This test shows how easily songs can be accessed. We start a timer with the phone in the closed, unlocked position and stop it when we get a song to play. The LG Chocolate completed this test in 2.04 seconds, thanks largely to its dedicated music button. It only took two key hits to play the song. This time is a 2.69 second improvement over the old model, probably because you didn't need to interact with the iffy touch buttons this time. The new Chocolate is also faster than the Razr V3m (12.1 seconds), the Sanyo M1 (5.5 seconds), and the N75 (4.04 seconds). We were very impressed by the ease at which a Chocolate user could access their songs.
| Cell Phone | Time (sec) | Score |
| LG Chocolate VX8550 | 2.04 | 9.80 |
| Sanyo M1 | 5.50 | 3.64 |
| Motorola Razr V3m | 12.10 | 1.65 |
| LG Chocolate VX8500 | 4.73 | 4.23 |
| Nokia N75 | 4.04 | 4.95 |
| LG Shine KE970 | 2.80 | 7.14 |
Dedicated Music Controls (4.0)
Music Software Functionality and Organization (7.0)
The Chocolate sports some decent music software. You can create playlists using a checkbox selection mode, very similar to managing pictures and videos. It supported all our audio files: AAC, MP3, and WMA. The Chocolate also recognizes Idv3, iTunes, and Windows Media Player tags, so you won't have to worry about converting files. The Chocolate also automatically updates your library when new songs are added, but only if they're located in the "my_music" folder. The phone will also play music in the background as you do other things. Also included is a "Music Only" mode, which most cell phone users know as "Airplane Mode"; it allows the phone to solely function as an MP3 player and turns off all the wireless radios to make it safe for use on a plane.
Searching is fairly robust, allowing you to sort by song title, artist, album, and genre. There is also a multi-tap search feature, but unfortunately it uses the contact menu's letter-by-letter search as opposed to the calendar/note menu's fragment search. This is especially disappointing in a playlist, as you might only know part of the artist's name, are unsure of an album's exact name, or forgot a song actually began with "a" or "the."
The Chocolate also has an equalizer, though for reasons unbeknownst to us, chose to call its menu "Sound Effect." Said menu is bordered by a graphic claiming you are choosing from 12 preset "3D Effects". Regardless of what the Chocolate wants us to believe, however, we remain confident this feature is just an equalizer.
Online Song Downloading (5.0)
Keeping with the Verizon tradition, the Chocolate supports the VCast Music Store as a way of downloading music. Really, it's the only justification for calling the multimedia menu "GET IT NOW." As before, the store is easy to navigate around, informative, and just a bit slow. Verizon docked the Chocolate some points here, since they still charge $1.99 for songs while carriers like Sprint have made $0.99 the industry standard.
Streaming (0.0)
As with most regular phones, the LG Chocolate doesn't support streaming audio.
Podcast Support (0.0)
The only way to get podcasts on your Chocolate is to download them to a memory card first. There isn't any dedicated software for podcasts, despite their popularity. It's common for phones to lack such software, but we would like to see that change.
Music Sync with PC (0.0)
The Chocolate can sync with your PC, but it only appears to work with Windows Media Player. We review phones based on their out-of-the-box capabilities, and unfortunately the Chocolate didn't come packaged with a USB. Therefore, unless you buy a USB cable for your Chocolate, it won't be able to sync with your PC. The only way you can get music on your phone without the cable is by using a memory card and USB memory card reader.
Music Formats and DRM (3.5)
The LG Chocolate supports MP3, AAC, and WMA files. The only DRM it supports is Verizon's own VCast. Standard DRMs include Microsoft’s PlaysForSure and Real’s Rhapsody DNA. Basically, Verizon only wants you to buy songs from their online store. We were disappointed to see the lack of support for any of these standards as it confines you to Verizon's music store, which is significantly more expensive than other options.
Music Interruption (8.0)
The LG Chocolate only pauses your music for the duration of a call. This is preferable to the old model, which didn't unpause music after a call had ended. One issue we had with this functionality, however, is that playback resumed the second the call ended at the same volume as before. Some phones add in a brief pause before resuming the music, and some phones, like the iPhone, fade the music back in. Overall, though, the phone performed well.
Video
Video Software Access (7.38)
This section tests how difficult it is to access the video software. As with other timing tests, the phone begins in the closed, unlocked position. Time stops as soon as we can get a video to start playing. We do five trials, then average their times. The LG Chocolate received an average time of 2.71 seconds. This is a very good time. It was 10.41 seconds faster than the N75, 3.59 seconds faster than the Razr V3m, 2.63 seconds faster than the old Chocolate, and 0.99 seconds faster than the Sanyo M1. Again, most of this ease is due to keypad shortcuts. Experienced users won't have to even wait for menus to load if they know the key sequence that will lead them to where they want to go.
| Cell Phone | Time (sec) | Score |
| LG Chocolate VX8550 | 2.71 | 7.38 |
| Sanyo M1 | 3.70 | 5.41 |
| Motorola Razr V3m | 6.30 | 3.17 |
| LG Chocolate VX8500 | 5.34 | 3.75 |
| Nokia N75 | 13.12 | 1.52 |
| LG Shine KE970 | 7.40 | 2.70 |
Video Controls (5.0)
Video Software & Organization Score (1.5)
As mentioned above, the LG Chocolate supports full-screen mode, which is presented in landscape. Your video library is updated automatically, but if you're using a memory card, they must be stored in the "my_flix" folder. Videos are organized by the date they were taken, and cannot be sorted further. There really isn't much offered for managing your videos. You can only rename them or move them to and from a PC or memory card. The Chocolate doesn't offer anything like playlist support, and we were disappointed to see we couldn't even queue our videos. The functionality that is available is easy to use, but that's akin to praising the interface of a light switch.
We also deducted a half point because, during testing, the Chocolate would randomly get hung up for about 10 seconds at a time. Fortunately, afterward the phone would catch up on all the keys pressed during the downtime and not need a reboot. Sometimes these freezes were accompanied by a graphical glitch in the interface. When we noticed the frequency of these soft-crashes we tried to duplicate them, but were unsuccessful. We did notice the phone tended to get hung up when we attempted to play an "unsupported" video file (see Video Formats below), but also when we booted up video taken with the phone itself. The Chocolate froze up in three places: the video album screen, when we booted up a video, and while we were watching a video. These problems could just be with our phone, but over the course of our testing it averaged about one such soft-crash per minute.
Video Sync with PC (0.0)
The LG Chocolate does not support video sync out of the box. If it came bundled with a USB cord, it would sync up with Windows Media Player.
Video Formats (2.0)
The LG Chocolate played 3GP files encoded in MP4 just fine. It also played standard MP4 files. We were occasionally able to get 3GP files encoded in H263 to play, but they generally caused the phone to crash, leading us to award no points. Other unsupported video files, such as Windows Media, Real Media, Quicktime, and Flash didn't load thumbnails. In our search for consistent results, we tried restarting the phone, waiting for all the thumbnails to load before playing, not waiting for them to load before playing, and repeating the last two steps with the files stored on a memory card. We were, however, unable to achieve any sort of consistency for when the files decided to play versus when they simply displayed the first frame.
Video DRM (0.0)
The LG Chocolate doesn't include video DRM software support. This means clips bought from iTunes or Amazon Unboxed won't work.
Video Playback Smoothness (3.0)
To test playback smoothness, we attempt to play five 3GP files of increasing bitrates. The Chocolate could play 56Kbps files smoothly. The 112Kpbs file was questionably watchable, as it frequently skipped ahead and lagged behind, and was often covered in artifacts. Overall, though, the Chocolate kept up. At 256Kbps the video was mainly just a slideshow of still frames. At 384Kbps and higher, only the first frame was displayed and it had two horizontal bars of glitching. The playback was better than the old Chocolate and the Razr V3m, but still only adequately displays the bare minimum.
The LG Chocolate can't download video via an online service.
Video Streaming unscored
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