In May 2006 the famous LG Chocolate phone officially hit the shelves all over Europe. The handset was incredibly successful in Korea with over 400 000 sold and now LG Electronics are trying to recreate that very success on the Old continent with a GSM/GPRS version of their chocolate candy bar.

The slim classy-looking slider phone is more than a fashion accessory - it boasts nice technological features such as a MP3/AAC music player, 1.3 mega-pixel camera with a flash, Bluetooth, USB support, 128MB integrated memory and is one of the slimmest in its class and form factor - only 15.2 mm.

One of the unique design features of the handset is the hidden heat sensitive touchpad on the outer cover which remains invisible as long as you don't touch it. It cannot be activated by some other object in your pocket for example because it reacts to the warmth of your hands only. Once touched though it starts glowing in warm red ready to take your oders. This is the first time that a touch keypad of this kind is used in a mobile handset. Likewise the TFT display is equally invisible and cannot be seen before it lights up. It has a 2-inch diagonal, 176x220 pixels resolution and offers 256K colors.

LG KG800 Chocolate

At a weight of only 83 grams the phone incorporates a 800 mAh Li-Polymer battery which according to the manufacturer should have 200h of stand-by time and 3:20 h of talk time.

The phone comes along with a nice fashionable set of accessories among which a MP3 player remote which has 3.5 mm jack for plugging in your own headphones for the ultimate listening experience.

Anyway, the lack of memory card slot is one disadvantage which would surely discourage you to use the phone as a real music player. This injustice is not even remedied by a FM radio which we are so used to see in current phones but which is absent here. Another bad thing is the low display resolution - we are so used to the QVGA displays with 240x320 pixels that 176x220 just doesn't seem to cut it anymore. But whatever the flaws, the phone surely does manage to stand out in the crowd.

Now, you should be careful not to mistake the Chocolate KG800 with its CDMA brothers and sisters released on the Korean market for some time now. Some of those do have a memory card slot, 512 MB integrated memory and a larger QVGA display. In Korea the Chocolate shell has got even a white and a pink version but in Europe the handset is going to be sold in black only.

Our team was genuinely intrigued by this fashionable piece of mobile ingenuity, so we successfully managed to help ourselves with a test handset. You should expect our review of KG800 soon. Up until now our first impressions are that the phone looks absolutely gorgeous - you just can't get the right impression by looking at its photos only. The heat sensitive touch pad is great, but it takes some time to get used to. nce you've managed it, you would be able to control the phone with no hassle at all. We must add though, that the "chocolate" shell is a magnet for fingerprints - so it's good that it comes with a pouch as a standard accessory. That should help a lot in this aspect.