Chocolate by LG: A Study in Trend-jumping

In the world of high tech products, the buzz gets going early, usually long before the product sees its first customer. And out of the gate, most high tech reviewers give a knee jerk reaction to a pretty face and a novel idea. So it shouldn't come as any surprise that when the Chocolate by LG (the VX8500 for old-schoolers who prefer numbers in their product names), available from Verizon, hit the market a few days ago, the massive drool began.

The Chocolate is a sexy-looking hybrid device that serves as both your phone and your music player. Think about an iPod phone, and you've got the right idea.

When it was announced, Engadget did the closest thing to a phone striptease that I've seen with a public un-boxing. And the news everywhere announced that the iPod had a new and formidable contender.

The Chocolate is pretty. It's all black and shiny and edgeless. It uses an iPod like scroll wheel and a slide-out phone design. The phone has tons of features like games, GPS, TV clips and of course, a camera. Verizon is selling the Chocolate phone for $149.99, with a two-year subscription and after a $50 rebate.

But I've learned that you've got to read the reviewer's fine print and look for the code words when a much hyped product gets introduced.

At Cnet, they called it a trendy, media-heavy cell phone. Not a pejorative, but if you're not into paying a premium to be part of a trend this is your first sign of trouble. Then there's the sentence describing Verizon's V Cast payment system for downloading music which makes Verizon's execs seem like they've been smoking crack. It says, that the V Cast media store has 1.3 million songs in Windows Media Audio (WMA) format. Songs downloaded to a Chocolate phone will cost $1.99, copies of which will be automatically sent to the user's PC. If the song is downloaded to the PC from V Cast's Web site, however, the fee is only 99 cents. The song can then be loaded onto the phone at no extra cost. Huh?

But the review that really gave me pause was Sascha Segan's over at PC Magazine. Segan's bottom line is that the phone is sexy indeed but that the "the quirky, touch-sensitive interface takes some getting used to, but it is worth it." Now I know Sascha, and he's brilliant about phones, so when he says it'll take some getting used to, I add a year to his estimate to accommodate my slow rate of change. The review is filled with telling phrases like "takes some getting used to" and "a little out of the ordinary" whether he's talking about the way the phone slides open, the buttons on the case, or the Flash based menu system. And Segan more blatantly points out the extras you'll need like extra memory and a headset to really make The Chocolate work as you'd imagine.

Me, I'm a bit schizophrenic about products like this. There's a part of me that wants the coolest device, and this is the coolest of the moment for sure. But usually, I let those phrases like "odd", "quirky", and "trendy" sober me. What about you? Trend-jumper or not?