The BL40, not just a souped-up chocolate

(News Terupdate) - We often encounter Version II of a successful Version I gadget, with the two devices sharing little more than a name. The product maker just adds a few features, makes some superficial changes and hopes the successor will sell like hotcakes.


So, when I was first given the opportunity to try out LG’s new chocolate BL40 (the fourth generation of LG’s Black Series mobile phones), I wondered whether this version truly warranted the designation “new”.

As you may remember, the first Black Label Series, called Chocolate, to make us crave it, came out in 2006. So is the BL40 worth being called “new”?

The answer, in my opinion, is a resounding yes. Let us start with the phone’s actual design. The BL40 has a unique form. It is 12.8 centimeters long, about 1 centimeter longer than Nokia E71, one of my favorite smartphones.

The device is only 5.1-centimeters wide, making this mobile look somewhat like basketball player Yao Ming.

However, the most striking feature is definitely its touch screen that fills most of the front panel.
If you hold the phone horizontally, it will become one of the widest.

Watching YouTube videos, for example, is pretty enjoyable on the wide, high-quality screen.
“It’s like taking movies from the theater to your palm,” said Richard Susilo, product marketing LG Mobile Communication Indonesia. To complement the wide screen, LG has also embedded Dolby Mobile in the BL40.

The body itself is meticulously manufactured, just like most other mobile phones from LG. The screen is protected with hardened glass that extends all the way to the rounded edges.
Although it is called Chocolate, the color is piano-black. There is a 3.5-millimeter jack on top for the headphone.

The headphone cord also serves as the radio antenna, just in case you want to listen to a traffic report from Elshinta.

The camera at the back is a five-megapixel one with a flash. The lens does not have a sliding cover, but there is a protective clear plastic that is part of the battery cover. Overall, the design is minimalist but very elegant.

Now, let us explore the real capabilities of this phone. The BL40 uses a 3D user interface (UI) called S-Class. This UI first debuted in LG Arena, which I did not get to test drive.

There is no hardware navigation button, so everything is performed with a tap on the screen icons.
Four home screens are available — browser, widgets, contacts and shortcuts.

The icons, which can be accessed by tapping a dice-looking icon, are organized into four main groups: Communications, entertainment, utilities and settings.

“It’s like taking the movie from the theater to your palm.”

When held in a landscape position, we have more icons than we can remember. It took me some
time to become familiar with the icons and the menus. But, the more I learn to use it, the more I like this smartphone.

Given the breadth of features the BL40 offers, the device is quite responsive.

The system is robust as I have not yet experienced a crash. Even the horizontal scrolling of the browser, if we still need it, works fast enough.

Given the size of the screen, it is pretty clear that watching videos was one of the main uses the creators of the BL40 had in mind when designing the gadget.

LG has packed many other features into the BL40 to make it a smartphone.

Its browser takes advantage of the entire screen width. If we want to zoom in, we only need to use two
fingers just like the multi-gesture touchpad found in most notebooks today. We only need one finger to scroll in any direction.

We can store and playback videos in this smartphone in AVI, MP4, DivX and Xvid.

To lock the screen, we press the power button located on top of the device.

Another interesting gimmick has been used to unlock the phone. For example, I can set the phone to record a letter “Z” that I scribble on the screen. When the phone is locked, all we have to do is scribble the letter “Z” again.

More important is the support for HSDPA, which will give us up to 7.2 megabits per second. This enables us to download video and access the Internet at high speed.

Another useful feature is the “copy and paste” feature. We can copy from the browser and paste it in another application such as the SMS or save it in a separate file for later use.

To make the process easy, we can also split the screen into two without having to close any running application. For example, we can open a website on the left and an SMS application on the right.

By the way, the BL40 is a smartphone with a multi-tasking capability. It has one gigabyte of internal memory, but we can add an external MicroSD to get a whopping 16 gigabytes of storage capacity for photos and videos.

Sending messages, whether using SMS or email, is also as easy as A-B-C. We just tap on the right icons at the bottom of the screen, which will bring up a contact list we can organize into groups and favorites.

No matter how close the device is to perfection, some of its capabilities could still be enhanced.
There is room for improvement when it comes to the five-megapixel camera, fitted with a Schneider-Kreuznach lens. The photos I took using the camera came out a bit too dark. Otherwise, it is quite usable.

BL40’s battery does not last very long, not even a whole day – which is understandable.

It is a trade-off that users of most feature-rich smartphones must live with. In addition, this mobile phone is slim — it is only 1 centimeter thick, and therefore there is not enough space to snap in a large battery.

Another item on my wish list concerns the price. At Rp 6 million (US$600), the BL40 is pretty expensive. Research has shown that the prices of smartphones have come down substantially since many vendors are producing them.

But, if money is not an issue for you, this is a premium smartphone with a number of innovative features and is not for the fainthearted. Its unique shape and wide, high-quality screen will make it stand out among other smartphones.

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