For those that aren’t familiar with Verizon’s Chocolate here’s the 411:Â It’s a web-enabled, multimedia, bluetooth capable, 1.3 mega pixel camera/video phone with a laundry-list of bells and whistles.
I love the design. It has a beautiful glossy black finish and bright red futuristic touch-sensitive buttons.  They seemed clumsy at first but my big fingers have adapted well. I imagine every chocolate owner has to find their “sweet” spots. You can also program shortcut keys which work great. You can use the phone’s features with the slider closed giving it that mp3 player “feel” which is a nice touch.
I dont have any bluetooth devices (did I just admit that out loud?) and it’s going to be hard to resist all the all toys that I can use with this phone including wireless headphones or speakers.
I like the web-enabled feature. The big, bright screen looks great and has plenty of real estate for actually reading your email or the news. Im still disappointed this comes with a $5-a-month fee however; they seem to get you coming and going.  In their defense though they give you the first month free so I guess “try before you buy” is a fair way to decide.
The GPS feature is amazingly accurate if anything. It found my exact location (as in my home address) in a matter of seconds. Not as much fun or as easy as other regular GPS devices but it does provide the basic features you’d expect to find like maps, driving directions, prior searches and “Where Am I?”. The $9 a month price tag is ridiculous but fortunately there’s a $3-for-24hours option instead Im sure Ill take advantage of on more than one occasion.
On to the multimedia portion; you wont be doing anything with it without the $30 multimedia pack. It includes the USB cable, ear buds and Windows Media Player10 which is required to synchronize your phone with your computer. Setup was easy and I filled what memory was left with about 50 megs of music. There’s an additional slot for a microSD card (the size of 1/2 a thumbnail) for an additional 256 MB all the way up to 2 GB of storage; or about 1000 songs.
The drawbacks are few but significant. There’s no speakerphone which is a little odd considering it’s a fairly standard feature with almost any mobile phone today. Im sure this is a deal-breaker for some and that’s unfortunate for Verizon. Im anticipating a patch to enable it; I cant see them not.
The other disappointing part was the battery life. Listening to the MP3 player and fiddling with the phone all day killed the battery in a short 6 hours. Granted I was using the phone more like a laptop than a phone but I still expected a little longer play time.
Overall I’d give the phone a 9 out 10. I’ve been waiting for a serious mp3 phone with all the bells and whistles and although there’s room for improvement I think the LG Chocolate is going to be one of hottest phones on the market for a while.