The hottest selling phone this quarter and around Valentines day, at least to my predictions, will be the new LG Chocolate mp3 player / mobile phone. The design of the phone is sleek, dark black almost invisible when closed, but illuminates when opened. The custom Verizon interface has been touched up to accommodate the Chocolate, and utilizes animation powered by Adobe Flash. Despite rumors, however there is no scroll feature like the ipod and doing so will result in just random button pressing (it would of been nice though.) Unlike the ipod, and other VCast handsets the Chocolate is capable of playing WMA files as well as MP3 files - Unfortunately despite what has been advertised by Verizon you can’t set the MP3s as a ring tone, unless you download them from the VCast store.

Additional Features of the LG Chocolate:

• microSD card slot
• EV-DO
• 1.3 megapixel camera
• Stereo Bluetooth
• Verizon VCast
• VZ Navigational System
• Expandable Memory

Overall the phone is very fashionable, and music savvy. Most will find the memory card add-ons a necessity, as the current stick only holds around 50MB. Sound quality is superb on the Chocolate, and the QVGA screen is nicely displayed. Lot’s of accessories and updates are available already for this phone, and Verizon’s marketing campaign is sure to do wonders (myspace is loaded with these ads already.)

The LG Chocolate from Verizon should range you from US$149.99 if you buy it online from Verizon’s Chocolate LG8500 website.