LG BL40 Chocolate review

LG's new Chocolate is the latest addition to its Black Label line. But is it any good?

The LG BL40 Chocolate
The LG BL40 Chocolate

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Battery life on the LG BL40 Chocolate is sadly very poor. The screen might look very pretty, but it must absolutely drain the power source, and these days 1000mAh batteries aren't big enough for this kind of device.

Using the internet on and off for an hour drained the battery down one bar, having the Push Email running in the background did the lifetime of a single charge no favours, and the video player really ate into the power too.

LG bl40 chocolate

It seems that to fit everything into such a slim frame, LG had to decide what to shave off, and power management must have been high on that list. It's not a twice-a-day charge job or anything, but it came close on occasion for us during our time with it, and that's us only having it for a week.

There are ways of helping it out, such as turning off auto-brightness and sliding the brightness of the LG BL40 Chocolate right down (it's not that bad). Colours might not look as vivid, but at least you'll still be able to call people.

LG bl40 chocolate

The Utilities section of the phone is as well stocked as you'd expect from a feature phone such as the LG BL40 Chocolate, with things like memos, calendar, multiple alarms and world clock all in attendance. Other than that, the calculator, timer and stopwatch all do exactly what they promise to do and not a lot more.

LG bl40 chocolate calendar

The LG BL40 Chocolate is well stocked when it comes to connectivity, and brings a few things you might not expect.

Of course there's the normal range of options, Bluetooth with A2DP 2.1, Wi-Fi connectivity, 3.5G HSDPA. We were also very pleasantly surprised to find an FM transmitter on board as well, meaning you can pump your tunes or add in some real time surround sound to your videos if you've got speakers hooked up to a radio.

LG bl40 chocolate wi-fi

The GPS chip, ably helped by a little aGPS number, works well, as we mentioned before. It starts up quickly and integrates well into the applications on board (WisePilot and Google Maps) with a good strength of connectivity holding on even in covered portions of the outdoors.

LG bl40 chocolate dlna

DLNA is also covered by the LG BL40 Chocolate, so if you've got yourself a home media network you'll be able to both discover and share media across it, although this can be a little bit tricky to set up. Our tip - make sure you've got the latest version of Windows Media Player running on a PC somewhere and you've set to allow sharing in the options panel.

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Gareth Beavis
Formerly Global Editor in Chief

Gareth has been part of the consumer technology world in a career spanning three decades. He started life as a staff writer on the fledgling TechRadar, and has grown with the site (primarily as phones, tablets and wearables editor) until becoming Global Editor in Chief in 2018. Gareth has written over 4,000 articles for TechRadar, has contributed expert insight to a number of other publications, chaired panels on zeitgeist technologies, presented at the Gadget Show Live as well as representing the brand on TV and radio for multiple channels including Sky, BBC, ITV and Al-Jazeera. Passionate about fitness, he can bore anyone rigid about stress management, sleep tracking, heart rate variance as well as bemoaning something about the latest iPhone, Galaxy or OLED TV.