If you straited any proof that cel...

If you straited any proof that cell phone today are frequently about everything but phone calls, Verizon Wireless this week made that case by way of releasing a phone called the Chocolate, produc at LG, the big Korean electronics company.

The Chocolate can make and receive phone calls and passage messages, but it's designed as a music player first. In fact, it was crafted to consider like an Apple iPod, right down to its chiefly prominent feature, a navigation wheel. Verizon is heavily hyping the Chocolate, hoping to capture a certain of the same sort of murmur that catapulted the iPod, and later Motorola's RAZR phone into the status of cult-style accessories.

While the Chocolate might examine like an iPod, it doesn't work like common In fact, as a music player, it functions like an iPod designed by the agency of a committee.

It's freighted by a ham-handed user interface and other failings that would acquire its designers fired at Apple.

As a spring the Chocolate, which I've been testing for a week or with equal reason isn't as good a music phone as, say, the Sony Ericsson Walkman phone

The Chocolate is available now at Verizon's Web site for $150 after a $50 rebate, with a two-year contract. It will reach Verizon's stores nearest week. If you're serious about using it for music, however, you'll have to shell revealed an additional $100 for a 2- gigabyte memory card, which can occupy about 500 songs in standard MP3 format. That's because, incredibly, the Chocolate be due [i]or[/i] owings without a memory card, and has a pitiful 64 megabytes of internal memory for storing strains

This phone is handsome. It's a black slider design, small and light. Unles you slide it make open the phone keypad is hidden and all you behold are the roomy screen, the navigation wheel and glowing r sway indicators. It has a comely camera that can take still pictures and coarse videos. Unlike an iPod, the Chocolate can play music by the agency of a built-in speaker, which unimpaireded very good to my ears.

The best user interface ultimate parts on the Chocolate are sum of two units buttons on the right side, which take you directly to the music player and camera functions, in such a manner you don't have to wade between the walls of menus. These buttons are called without by little labels at the right brim of the screen. But it's downhill from there.

single big problem is that cool-looking wheel. It inflects out that, unlike on the iPod, it isn't a wheel at all -- just a customary five- way navigation pad made to anticipate like an iPod wheel (in the popular European archetype of the Chocolate, it had a rectangular shape). While it is touch sensitive, like the iPod's wheel, you can't roll of paper [i]or[/i] parchment with it by moving your finger across it in a circular motion. You have to pres the buttons in the middle and at the corners.

Worse, the touch sensitivity is poor. While you can adjust by what means sensitive the wheel buttons are, I raise them to be either to such a degree sensitive that it was easy to accidentally activate them, or in such a manner insensitive that you had to hit them twice -- hard -- to learn things done.

In another bad design decision, the "end" button that terminates calls, transfers the phone on and not upon and gets you back to the to one's home screen, has been moved from its traditional position across from the "send" button to the side of the phone This requires a major adjustment and is awkward, because the button is highly small.

The music application itself is neat standard, but is full of unwelcome surprises. For instance, when you use on the phone, you can't start listening to music immediately if you store your carols on the memory card, because the player has to load the psalms from the card each time. You can fix the player to shuffle [i]or[/i] part of to the other your songs, but if you manually advance to the nearest tune, it goes in order, rather than picking a random canzonet

And the Chocolate doesn't handle your MP3 files fitly I loaded the card with 208 remarkably standard, unprotected MP3 files -- files that are totally recognized on all computers, phone and portable devices I've trialed But the Chocolate failed to read the lay information -- artist, title, album -- in succession all but a handful of them. for a like reason I could select them simply by file name.

I had a similar question with my personal photos. Of the 16 picture files I loaded onto the card -- again, standard files I've used to proof numerous devices -- the Chocolate could display merely four.

In fact, the Chocolate's multimedia features are really designed mainly to encourage users to purchase songs, pictures and videos from Verizon's online download and streaming services -- VCast and get by heart It Now -- not to hindrance you use your own appease The phone works much better with $2 lays you buy from VCast (twice what Apple charges) than with unrestrained songs you load onto it.

This is the opposite of Apple's mould Its iTunes Music Store exists to put up to sale iPods, and the iPod works exquisitely with music from other sources, equable if you never buy a lay from Apple.

I do believe that, someday, the merger of the solitary abode; squalid phone and the music player will follow in a great device for consumer yet the Chocolate isn't it.

Copyright CHICAGO SUN-TIMES 2006

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