LG Chocolate VX8550 Cell Phone Review - Organizer
|
Mark Brezinski Published on July 27, 2007 Comment on this |
|
|
|
|
|
Synchronization Ease of Use (0.0)
The LG Chocolate doesn't offer the option to synchronize contacts, calendar entries, or other personal information with your computer.
Alerts (5.0)
Like the old Chocolate, you set alerts through the Calendar application. You can set reminders to occur anywhere from the moment of the event to two days before, or turn off the alert altogether. You can choose any ringtone to sound when the reminder goes off, or set the phone to vibrate, but you cannot set it to both vibrate and ring. The alert sound/vibration is set individually, not globally, so each different reminder can be distinct. Also, the phone's volume settings usurp the alarms, so if it is set to vibrate, your tone alert will instead vibrate; there is no option for vibration that allows a reminder's tone to still play. Also, while there is a phone volume setting "Alarm only," this does not include calender alerts. Users should definitely keep this in mind as it will undoubtedly result in missing alerts.
When an alert goes up, a menu comes up that has the calendar icon, the word, "Calendar," and an option to view the event now or later. "View now" will just bring you to the edit event interface for that event. The "View later" option is essentially a five-minute snooze. Unfortunately, the five-minute delay is the only snooze option available. If you don't choose an option, the alert will continue for a full minute before automatically selecting "View later".
Overall, the alert functionality does its job. Even if you manage to miss a full minute of vibrating/ringing, it will just keep trying every five minutes.
Over the Air PIM Sync (0.0)
The LG Chocolate does not offer any over the air PIM synchronization.
Address Book
Adding Contacts (4.88)
For this test, we start a timer with the phone in the closed, unlocked position. We stop the timer after we enter a contact consisting of a full name and a number. We use five different sets of contact information, then average all the times together. We do trials with different sets of information to better approximate a real scenario; a user won't be entering in the same contact multiple times. The LG Chocolate took an average of 20.5 seconds, which is 1.2 seconds faster than the previous Chocolate. This is fairly speedy compared to other phones. The Razr V3m took 27.9 seconds, the Nokia N75 took 22.84 seconds, and the Sanyo M1 took 20.6 seconds. As fast as the Chocolate's time was, phones with full keyboards tend to be a few seconds faster. For example, the Treo 700p only took 17.7 seconds.
| Cell Phone | Time (sec) | Score |
| LG Chocolate VX8550 | 20.5 | 4.88 |
| Sanyo M1 | 20.6 | 4.85 |
| Motorola Razr V3m | 27.9 | 3.58 |
| LG Chocolate VX8500 | 21.7 | 4.61 |
| Nokia N75 | 22.84 | 4.38 |
| LG Shine KE970 | 28.5 | 3.51 |
Looking/Sorting/Search (1.5)
The LG Chocolate organizes contacts alphabetically by name. Searching through contacts is done using multi-tap. There is only one dialogue box for name, not separate ones for first and last. Therefore, the only way to sort by last name is by inputting a contact's last name first when creating the entry. Also, to search for a contact, you need to type in the contact's name exactly, starting with the first letter. This is incredibly disappointing, as this search function is worse than the search used for notes or events. The note/event search will show all notes/events that contain the search entry anywhere within its body. Meanwhile, searching contacts for "bert" will not return "Albert"; if you enter a first and last name into the name box, such as "Albert Smith", you won't find it if you search for "smith". It is a absolute mystery why LG/Verizon would choose to downgrade an existing search function for one section.
There are no additional search or organization options. You can assign an entry to one of five preset groups, such as "Colleagues" or "Business," which are mainly used for group texting. You can't organize or search by group. Not much has changed since the first Chocolate, and the lack of improvement is disappointing. Many phones offer additional options for organizing and searching, such as sorting by last name and predictive text.
Fields (2.2)
The new Chocolate actually has one less field than the old one, and it was the one field we felt was innovative: custom text message alerts. As it stands, the new Chocolate only has standard fields for contacts. You can customize a contact by adding a personalized ring tone, picture (not video), or assigning them a group from a list of presets, but these are options you can find on any modern phone.
Speed Dial/Voice tags/Voice command (5.67)
The LG Chocolate has 99 different speed dial values you can attribute to a phone number. You can either assign a speed dial value to a phone number or vice versa; there are specific menus for each. The menu for the former is somewhat buried. To assign a number to a speed dial value, you have to go into a contact and highlight the phone number you wish to create the shortcut for. When you do, an options menu will become available via a soft key. From this menu, you can only assign the number you were editing to a speed dial. The second menu is under contacts in the main menu (note: the contacts soft key on the home screen takes you do a different menu). This brings up the 99 speed dial values, which you can browse and assign different numbers to.
You cannot add a voice tag to a contact. The Chocolate does have voice command software, though. All you do is say a contact's name and the software will try to guess what you're saying. The voice recognition was actually very good, correctly identifying all our test names.
Calendar
Adding Calendar Items (15.43)
For this section we test how easy it is to add a new calendar item. To do this, we time how long it takes to enter in a calendar reminder starting from the closed, unlocked position. The chocolate took an average of 6.48 seconds to do this. As it turns out, adding calendar items on the LG Chocolate is incredibly fast if you know what you're doing. Initially we believed the relatively hidden location of the calendar program would hinder the phone's score (Main Menu > Settings & Tools > Tools > Calendar). Fortunately, down on the d-pad is a shortcut to the calendar. We actually didn't realize this initially, and in our initial tests we just used keypad shortcuts (the Chocolate still scored a speedy 11 seconds). The test calendar entry requires us to set a reminder for 15 minutes before the event, which the Chocolate does as a default. Changing the time of an appointment is easy, as you can simply type in the time on the keypad.
Compared to other phones, the Chocolate is extremely fast. The old Chocolate took 29.4 seconds, the Razr V3m took 22.6 seconds, and the Sanyo M1 took 16 seconds. The Chocolate was even faster than smart phones with keyboards. The T-Mobile Dash took 7.38 seconds and the BlackBerry 8800 took 6.92 seconds.
| Cell Phone | Time (sec) | Score |
| LG Chocolate VX8550 | 6.48 | 15.43 |
| Sanyo M1 | 16.00 | 6.25 |
| Motorola Razr V3m | 22.60 | 4.42 |
| LG Chocolate VX8500 | 29.40 | 3.40 |
| Nokia N75 | 19.20 | 5.21 |
| LG Shine KE970 | 12.50 | 8.00 |
Calendar Views (4.89)
There are three main calendar views on the LG Chocolate: Month, Week, and Day. There is no year denomination. There also isn't an agenda view, which would list all scheduled events.
The monthly view contains the least information, but is sadly the default view. Days with events that have passed are colored blue. Days with future events or uncompleted ongoing events are colored green. Sundays are all colored orange. Highlighting a day displays its number of events. From here you can either click on a specific day to go to the day view, or use the options menu to go to the week view. The week view displays the days of the week along the top, below which are their corresponding dates within the month. Below that is a grid, with each day broken up into hour blocks. Events highlight areas in a column between their start and ending time. This view does not differentiate between events, however, as they are all represented by the same white highlight. Again, the only way to view specific events in a day is to click, which brings you to the day view. Though the week view isn't as aesthetically pleasing as the month view, it displays more pertinent information and probably should have been made the default view. The day view lists individual events sorted by time. Clicking on them allows you to edit their individual fields.
The Chocolate allows you to search through events based on what you named it. This search is actually better than the one used for contacts, since you can type in any fragment of the event's title to find it. The entries are organized by date. Searching through scheduled events is actually a rare feature outside of a smart phone, and we were pleasantly surprised to see its inclusion. The search can also double as an agenda view, but since we don't feel this was its intended function, we did not award it points in that regard.
Overall, the Chocolate provides basic calendar functionality. People who need to manage complex schedules should look elsewhere.
The fields the LG Chocolate provide are Title, Start/End, Recurrence, and Reminder/Alarm. The reminder can be customized as either a vibration or one of the ringtones. You cannot set an event to an entire day, give the event a category, or jot a note about the event.
ToDo/Tasks
Adding ToDo/Task (0.0)
You cannot create to-do or task lists with the LG Chocolate.
ToDo/Task Sorting and Prioritizing (0.0)
Not applicable: you cannot create to-do or task lists.
Fields (0.0)
Not applicable: you cannot create to-do or task lists.
Notes
Adding Notes (3.64)
To find out how difficult creating a note was, we time how long it takes to enter a simple note. We begin the timer with the phone on, closed, and unlocked, and end when we save the note.The LG Chocolate took an average of 13.73 seconds to type a note. The application was buried in menus, but the keypad can be used as a shortcut for navigation. This is fast compared to the N73 (15.12 seconds), which was the fastest in that series of phone. Most phones that have note-taking software are smart phones, however, with full keyboards that are much faster. For example, the Treo 700p only took 8.3 seconds.
| Cell Phone | Time (sec) | Score |
| LG Chocolate VX8550 | 13.73 | 3.64 |
| Sanyo M1 | N/A | 0.0 |
| Motorola Razr V3m | N/A | 0.0 |
| LG Chocolate VX8500 | 33.80 | 1.48 |
| Nokia N75 | 15.52 | 3.22 |
| LG Shine KE970 | 14.00 | 3.57 |
Note Interface (5.0)
The note functionality of the LG Chocolate remains unchanged. Opening up the notepad will reveal a list of notes. Each note displays the time and date it was created along with the first 21 characters. The search function is identical to the one used for events: you can search for any fragment of the note.
Note Formatting (0.0)
You can't format text in notes on the Chocolate. This is the norm, as even most smart phones don't allow this.
Voice Memo (6.0)
Creating a voice memo is very easy on the Chocolate. Just hold down the voice command button and press the select key to begin recording. You can record for up to one minute at a time. When the recording is stopped, it will be automatically saved in the "My Sounds" menu. You can find this menu by opening up the main menu, going to "GET IT NOW", and then opening up "Music and Tones."
| Previous Next | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
