nwfdailynews.com — If you needed any proof that cellphones today are often about everything but phone calls, Verizon Wireless this week made that case by releasing a phone called the Chocolate, produced by LG, the big Korean electronics company. The Chocolate can make and receive phone calls and text messages, but it's designed as a music player first.
Aug 3, 2006 View in Crawl 4
tehgoochAug 4, 2006
Maybe if people stopped buying phones because of hype the phone companies would make better phones.
splammoAug 4, 2006
Verizon rep to angry oveweight customer: what do you mean you ate your phone???
d2ndAug 4, 2006
microSD. really small, actually amazing
h0kiezAug 4, 2006
IMHO...get a windows mobile phone. I have the Cingular 2125 and love it. Windows Media Player is pretty good...and obviously works seamlessly with the music on your computer if you use WMP. I just don't see the need to reinvent the wheel with every manufacturer coming up with their own interface/mp3 software, etc., especially when so many are so half-assed.
projektdriftAug 7, 2006
hmm. cant use less than signs. that sucksit says $100 for 2gb card. if thats too much for you then buy a 1gb card. its less than $40 on newegg.com its 128mb internal memory. true the ipodish wheel is a 5 way navi and isnt as sensitive as you would like it and the fact that it doesnt look all that great sucking up to ipod fanboys. otherwise this phone looks and functions fine. better than any other phone for $50 straight from a carrier. the sony w800 costs at least $100 third party and w810 will probably be at least $150 cheapest if not 250
kire56Aug 14, 2006
Well, first of all comparing an MP3 player with a Cell Phone is kinda pointless. They both have a completely different functionality. Second of all since when does a 2gb SD card cost $100? Last time I checked on Newegg.com you could get 4gb for $70 (<a class="user" href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820211319)">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820211319)</a> . Regardless, I may not have much say, I have never touched, tried, or even seen this phone.
khuonAug 16, 2006
I second the Cingular 2125 suggestion if you want a device that's a phone first with enhanced features such as PDA functions and camera/entertainment features second. If you're looking for a PDA with phone features then try the 8125.I have the 2125 (aka HTC Faraday/Tornado).<a class="user" href="http://www.htcamerica.net/products/2125_specs.html">http://www.htcamerica.net/products/2125_specs.html</a>It runs Windows Mobile 5. This phone replaced my older Audiovox SMT5600 (aka HTC Typhoon) which ran Windows Mobile smartPhone2003. I also have a 1GB miniSD card in the phone which I use to store most of my third-party applications as well as music and small videos. The phone has 64MB of ROM and 64MB of RAM which then gets split into 44MB of running memory and around 20MB of application and user storage. The phone initially reads from internal RAM before it mounts the miniSD so I have some things installed in internal RAM (about 15MB) and the rest stored on the miniSD. I've got about 900MB of stuff on the 1GB miniSD card right now.It comes with a good set of preloaded software but its main advantage is that it's highly customisable. Everything is configurable via XML files that are accessable through a standard filesystem. The phone shows up as a USB drive and you can edit anything in the OS as you would a normal Windows-based computer and you can re-arrange the look and feel to suit your taste. There are also a lot of software out there. Another big draw (for me at least) is that the standard phone and menu interface on SmartPhones are very Nokia-like which was my previous preference for mobile handsets. I had very little trouble adjusting to the new interface. Additionally, the form-factour is very close to that of my old Nokia 8260 which was previously my favourite phone.As for playing music. I actually have three different applications. It comes preloaded with WMP10 which is pretty good but it leaves a bit to be desired for some things. It's main drawback I've found is that it is really bloated and can make the phone slow by hogging memory and processor resources. As is the case with most small embedded devices, this phone does not handle memory starvation very well. It will start to become unresponsive. Therefor I also have a free music player app called TCPMP (formerly and in the future known as BetaPlayer). It is a much more compact app (uses only about 10% the resources of WMP10) and has many features that WMP does not. I also use a commercial music app called PocketPlayer from Conduits. This is more advanced than either TCPMP (although TCPMP is getting close) and has a great customisable interface. Like WMP, I can also stream audio to these apps.Although for most things, I'm not a big fan of Microsoft products and the Windows OS, I'll have to say that I do really like Windows Mobile 5. My phone has no trouble interfacing and interoperating with my non-Windows computers. Although the phone is designed to seamlessly operate with Outlook, I have the email, calendaring, contact manager and task manager features working with other productivity suites. It also supports push-capability and thus acts like a Blackberry. It has a full-fledged email (Pocket Outlook) client that supports POP/IMAPO in addition to Outlook syncing and active mail-push. And it has a full-fledged web browser (PocketIE) and not just a WAP browser. And if you don't like those two apps, you can use third-party ones. I also use ProfiMail for my email client and Opera for my web browser. There are plenty of replacement and add-on apps available.The phone is not without its drawbacks. For one thing, it can get thrown into a weird corrupted state and my old SMT5600 used to wipe itself quite often (usually during times of extreme memory starvation). unfortunately, neither Cingular nor Microsoft supply you with a backup program out of the box. I consider the purchase of sprite Backup to be essential if you value any data or configuration of your SmartPhone. Also, bootup time is long when compared to a no-frills phone. It takes about 25 to 30 seconds for the phone to go from coldboot to fully booted. Some of this also has to do with a few third-party startup apps I'm running. Battery life is pretty good if you're not doing a lot of data or running processor-intensive apps. Despite the 1150mAH battery, I have run the phone's battery down during the course of a day of listening to music/watching videos while accessing mail, web browsing, chatting on IM or IRC, etc... Luckily, I have a spare battery because the older 1050mAH battery that went to my SMT5600 also works in my 2125.I made the switch from a basic phone (Nokia 8260) straight to a SmartPhone (Audiovox SMT5600) and never really tried the other feature-rich phones until my wife got herself a Nokia 6102. I discovered that it was quite limited when compared to what I could do with my SMT5600. For me, SmartPhone combines all the good user-interface features that I loved about my old Nokia with plenty of customisation and flexbility of a full-featured OS.