LG VX8600

Craving a taste of Chocolate but waiting for a phone you could really flip over? Well, the LG VX8600 delivers Chocolate style in a flip-phone form factor, though its performance won't satisfy the most demanding mobile users. The VX8600 is a seriously good-looking phone, ready for business or a night out on the town. In fact, I'd say it looks as good as the lovely KRZR K1m, though its all-plastic body doesn't feel as expensive as the KRZR's metal-accented case. At a wider 3.9 by 1.9 by 0.6 inch and weighing 3.3 ounces, the phone has a bigger 2.2-inch screen and larger (if completely flat) keys that will appeal to people who think the K1m is too small and narrow.

Made of smooth black plastic with silver trim, the VX8600 looks lacquered. It attracts fingerprints, but so do many shiny objects. The outside of the phone has an unusually big, bright color screen and light-up, touch-sensitive music buttons that you activate by hitting one of the volume keys on the side. Maybe: Inside, the keys are a decent size. Their flat, black look is beautiful (though not so convenient for dialing without looking), and the 176-by-220 screen is large and bright. I also found the user interface quick and responsive. No doubt most people will be using the VX8600 primarily as a voice phone. Voice reception is good; the phone connected in our home basement. That puts it on a par with my Motorola E815 test unit. Sound quality was fine, too, much like that of the LG VX8300 and the Chocolate (LG VX8500). The phone was good at handling wind noise; transmissions sounded clear; and it connected without a problem to Plantronics Bluetooth headsets. Voice dialing is the excellent no-training VoiceSignal system, though initial prompts can get can sometimes get cut off? when transferring calls over to Bluetooth. The speakerphone was extremely quiet. Battery life, at 3 hours 44 minutes, was decent but not outstanding.

I kept running into one major annoyance: a firmware bug that sometimes cut off EV-DO data reception. Though it happened only in one location, it was repeatable; it didn't occur on a Motorola E815 in the same location; and it caused seemingly random numbers to pop up on my test screens. The bug frequently locked me out of V Cast Music, too, since that requires EV-DO service. Nobody else on the Internet seems to be reporting this bug, soperhapsit's restricted to a small batch of VX8600s.

The 1.3-megapixel camera takes shots quickly, with a 0.3-second delay. But I wasn't thrilled with the picture quality: I saw pink or blue casts on some pictures, and indoor photos tended to be blurry. The phone records 176-by-144, 15-frame-per-second videos of average quality. You can store pictures and music in the 24MB of onboard memory or on a microSD card. My phone had trouble seeing a SanDisk 2GB microSD card I used, so you're probably better off sticking to 1GB cards.

The VX8600 has the same V Cast Video, VZ Navigator GPS, and V Cast Music capabilities as most midrange and high-end Verizon phones nowadays. Video plays in full screen, though it looks rather blocky. Music syncs with Windows Media Player using a $30 accessory kit, and you can play music over wired or Bluetooth headphones. The phone comes with a 2.5mm headset adapter for its oddball headset jack, but you'll need to buy an additional third-party adapter for $15 if you want to use 3.5mm music player headphones. Sadly, you can't play music in the background while you're doing other things with the phone. Music is decently loud, however, through the single speaker on the outside of the flip, though it sounds a bit like an old AM radio.

Verizon seems to have lifted its former policy of locking down Bluetooth; like the VX9900, the VX8600 lets you send and receive files over Bluetooth and use the phone as a modem on Verizon's EV-DO network. I managed to connect the VX8600 to both a Mac and a PC for file transfer and modem use.

To some extent, the VX8600 suffers from the same flaws as the Motorola KRZR K1m: a great design, but lukewarm performance when you go beyond simple voice calling. The VX8600 costs $70 less, though, so I recommend this phone over Motorola's model if you're looking for the sleekest thing on Verizon today. Less-fashion-oriented voice callers may want to look into the LG VX8300 instead, which has very similar features at a much lower price.