You know the deal by now: we grab a slab of fresh new hardware, fiddle, play, and tinker with it until exhaustion or boredom is reached, then wax poetic about the whole experience, with a side serving of pictures and videos thrown in. Today's candidate for a grilling is LG's BL40, which is now available in Europe. You'll be familiar with it already from our hands-on look last month, but do join us past the break where we explore what's under the glossy hood in more detail, and give you a definitive answer on just how useful that elongated screen really is.

Hardware

The BL40 immediately sets itself apart from the vast crowd of iPhone emulators with its unusual form factor. It's certainly a quirky choice, and early pictures of the handset lead at least this reviewer to rashly dismiss it as an ungainly and gimmicky device. Handling it in person, however, obliterates such concerns and the BL40 reveals itself to be ergonomically pleasing, whether in your hand, pocket, or next to your ear.


Where the iPhone might be considered a little too wide to comfortably hold up for traditional calls, the slimline BL40 feels entirely natural and its 128mm height only helps this by bringing the microphone closer to the speaker's mouth. Think of it as a throwback to the days of the Nokia 8110 or the like and you'll have a pretty good idea of what a conversation on this phone might feel like. The same applies for the rarely covered, but rather important, issue of pocketability: the BL40 was friendly to both shirt and jeans pockets, and its height was again a boon in that it kept the phone in a vertical orientation whereas many modern handsets tend to fall into a less convenient horizontal position. We wouldn't say it's quite as practical as any of the great mass of compact featurephones out there today, but the major thing to take away is that the size of the BL40 is no impediment to its regular day-to-day use. In fact, when compared to other smartphone wannabes, we'd say LG's New Chocolate comes out slightly ahead as it manages to retain most of the usability of smaller phones while extending to its non-standard 345 x 800 resolution.


External construction appears top notch, with a seamless transition from the tempered glass front to the hardy plastics around the side and back. This is the second BL40 we've handled and, just like the first, it exhibits zero creaks, design imperfections, or noticeable production flaws. Then again, there isn't an overwhelming amount of complexity when you're producing a device with all of four, side-mounted buttons -- two for volume and dedicated camera and media player keys -- but we give credit where it's due and LG's design here is executed to what seems like perfection. The only thing to point out is that the back of the device does get warm during extended browsing or gaming sessions, but never uncomfortably so, and, considering this is only a 11mm thick device, cools down remarkably quickly.

The biggest, both figuratively and literally, feature of the BL40 is of course its cinematic 21:9 display, which we can confirm is a beauty to behold. Colors were vivid, brightness was uniform, and the few movie clips we saw on it left us satisfied that its (non-HD) playback credentials are up to par. We remain unconvinced of the usefulness of the wider screen though, as the scarcity of native 21:9 content requires you to chop what videos you have into the appropriate size. Doing so, however, is likely to give all the actors in the movie you're watching an unwanted haircut. Last but not least, we should acknowledge the capacitive touchscreen, which impressed with generally rapid responsiveness and accurate reproduction of our actions.


User Interface

LG's S-Class UI is characterized by a bunch of little pseudo-realistic modifications -- such as sliding a visualized wheel for adjusting FM radio frequencies, or moving the hands on an analog clock to set the alarm time -- which we're big fans of. We're less enthusiastic, however, about the fact that in spite of having all that vertical room, LG makes you scroll up to see the full contents of a submenu far too often. Another misstep in our view is made with the main menu system, which overwhelms with the sheer amount and variety of options available. LG's intention is that you should primarily use the four "walls" of its 3D cube, where widgets, contacts, browser and app shortcuts reside, and that will for the most part be true, but it doesn't entirely make up for the rather cluttered menu system. Our choice would have been to use a more conventional hierarchical organization, rather than trying to fit all options on-screen at the same time -- it's intended as a way to save time, and perhaps with practice it does, but it took us longer to navigate as we hovered above the menu with uncertainty. In short, the UI gets marks for originality and trying something different, but sadly loses a lot of them in the execution.


A few notes are merited on the BL40's connectivity options and overall web experience. You get a choice of WiFi or HSDPA for hooking up, and then a pretty agile browser does a fine job of taking you where you want to go, with automatic page resizing and multitouch zooming actions making things relatively easy. You'll still want to steer clear of any Flash content, but on the whole we might say the web browser is the biggest beneficiary of the extra lateral space in landscape mode, as it made text-heavy pages easier to digest. Notably, both connectivity options take a predictably harsh toll on battery life, which we might rank somewhere ahead of the iPhone, but not by much.

The camera on the BL40 is a perfect example of why megapixels are fast becoming an utterly irrelevant part of the spec sheet. Boasting a five megapixel resolution and a Schneider KREUZNACH lens is all well and good, but reference to the gallery of sample images above shows a detectable graininess to the results, which was all the more apparent, and ruinous, in the full-size pictures. We wouldn't recommend this camera for anything larger than the 800 x 600 resolution of the sample shots, which places its utility at about the level of a bargain bin 0.3 megapixel webcam. Sad, but true. Things get no better when we switch over to video mode, where instead of stabilizing the image, the BL40 seemed to amplify slight vibrations into full-blown earthquake tremors. The resultant distortions and general inability to deal with movement within shot are to be seen in the recording below. Importantly, both pictures and videos looked entirely acceptable on the BL40's own screen and, should you have no intent to export the content elsewhere, the camera will serve your humble needs well.


The phone's image and video gallery offers a browsing interface akin to Apple's Cover Flow, but it got bogged down by lag once we added more than about twenty media items, forcing us to retreat to a more familiar grid-based browsing setup. Pinching and zooming, on the other hand, was pretty much spot on, both here and in the web browser. It's a shame, really, that such a well implemented feature has been allied to a laggy media browser, but then that tended to be the rule with the BL40: a lot of good, married to just as much bad, with a tiny sprinkling of ugly (watch the video above, if you haven't already).

For example, multitasking -- something a certain other phone iDoesn't do -- can be as smooth as butter. We were able to browse around the web, minimize the browser, check out some photos on the phone, then jump straight back into our browsing session. But then, that's offset by recognizable lag popping up here and there, which becomes particularly noticeable when you load up a few widgets and slap wallpapers on the UI cube's sides. Furthermore, while Bluetooth pairing with another device was painless, transfers were less so, and although MicroSD expansion is good to have, we experienced a number of failed transfers when trying to get images off the phone and onto a memory card. This is a truly unfortunate theme, and our conclusion about the phone's interface coalesces around one word: mediocrity.


Wrap-up

It's hard for a company like LG, which doesn't quite have the first tier mobile manufacturer cachet of the likes of Nokia and Sony Ericsson, to sell premier high-margin items such as this BL40 handset. We think its approach on the hardware front is absolutely spot on – by using high grade materials and a unique design, the Korean giant has certainly put together a device that grabs and merits our attention. What LG needs now is that same level of care and painstaking refinement to be applied to the software side of its phones. That need not necessarily be done by LG itself, with Android taking rapid steps forward in its development and Microsoft recently updating Windows Mobile to a marginally more usable version 6.5. At any rate, we were left frustrated by LG's own effort in the BL40, which kept taking one step forward, and one and a half back wherever we turned.

The BL40 is an excellently constructed, well thought out machine that fills our sex appeal box to the top. Where we found LG's watchphone lacking that extra bit of pizzazz to make it compelling, the BL40's design exudes just the right amount of eccentricity and flair to make it an aesthetically drool-worthy device. Regrettably, its beauty is mostly skin deep, as it's let down by an overly ambitious and inconsistent user experience. We see a lot of potential down the road, but as it stands today, the BL40 is just a pretty, shiny pretender that lacks the internal fortitude to challenge the incumbent market leaders.