LG Chocolate BL40 review

Slap an HD or a widescreen label on any product and it will sell. That's clearly what the marketing types think, with everything from phones to compact cameras suffering from the buzzword trickle down. But you know things have gone badly wrong when these sorts of antics start affecting product design - and that's precisely what's happened with the LG Chocolate BL40.

Dubbed the world's first widescreen phone, the Chocolate comes complete a gigantic 4in ultra-wide screen with what can only be described as a cinematic aspect ratio of 2.3:1. It looks and sounds impressive, as does the resolution of 800 x 345, but while we'd kill to get hold of a screen like that on a TV our living room, on a phone it turns out it's not so practical.

For starters it results in a phone so tall that to put it in your pocket would be risking serious injury. Sit down with an LG Chocolate in your front jeans pocket and it'll jab you painfully in the hip.

And while widescreen's great for watching movies, it's not so good for browsing websites, looking at photos or viewing maps: whichever way around you hold the screen, its skinny, letterbox profile means you either have to scroll too much when zoomed in, or squint too hard when zoomed out.

It's a shame because there's plenty about the Chocolate that we like. The capacitive touchscreen is sensitive, responding quickly to dabs and strokes. It supports multitouch too, so you can pinch to zoom pages and photos, and there's a range of fun gestures you can use from the lock screen to get straight to various screens – scrawl M and you go straight to messages, while C gets you to compose. The phone looks pretty swish too, in gloss black with chrome effect trim, and smart metallic edges at the top and bottom.

It's not missing anything in the features department either. The camera is a decent 5-megapixel unit with autofocus and an LED flash – one of the better cameras we've used on any recent smartphone – and it shoots 640 x 480 video at 30fps as well. Not only that, but there's GPS for use with the preinstalled Google Maps; you get an FM radio, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and HSDPA for data connectivity; and there are also light and proximity sensors, plus an accelerometer.

The operating system feels as if it's trying a touch too hard, with its rotating 3D carousel view of alternative homescreens, it's not too fiddly and, with a bit of practice, easy to find your way around. Other positive features include DivX support for video, an FM transmitter for sending tunes wirelessly to a nearby radio, and DLNA support so you can stream video and music from the phone over your wireless network to a laptop, PC or media streamer. The handset has a 3.5mm headphone socket, so you can use your own headphones with it, and sound quality is pretty good.