LG U830

LG made quite a splash with the Chocolate phone, a minimalist style icon that owed much of its appeal to its apparent lack of buttons, which would be awakened by sensuously stroking the black plastic casing. LG has been reissuing it in slightly different forms ever since and doing very well out of it, too, thank you very much.

The U830 is a clamshell Chocolate and looks exceptionally sleek with its jet black casing and chrome trim. But while it's certainly got the look, it feels unexpectedly lightweight and cheap when you pick it up.

That doesn't mean its spec is lightweight. It's a 3G phone with HSDPA for extra fast internet access, a versatile, dedicated music player playing MP3, AAC and WMA formats, and a 2-megapixel camera with a secondary VGA camera for video calls.

The Chocolate-style touch-sensitive buttons on the outside are limited to the phone's music player and are certainly well hidden – they won't flash up until you've pressed the volume button on the side. Then you can search your music collection using the lush 262,000-colour outer screen. Press the camera button on the other side, incidentally, and you're into snapshot mode (with 2x zoom and 9x multishot mode), without the need to open the clamshell.

Open it eventually you must, and inside the 262,000-colour inner screen is certainly big enough at 34x44mm, though it's not the sharpest we've seen. The keypad (standard issue inside, with no backlighting, touch-sensitive or otherwise) is well spread out, but the buttons aren't the most sensitive and don't give very good feedback. They're also uniformly flat and too many times we found our thumbs slipping across them.

The U830 is available on the 3 network, so there's a decent range of games from the likes of Gameloft and Hands-On available on tap. One Ghost Rider download later we found that the processor's no slouch when it comes to rendering fast-moving action, but the speaker struggled with the sound of the demon bells, as it did with all of the game's sound. After a few minutes we abandoned the keypad in favour of the navpad, which is big enough to accept fast-moving navigation from our bricklayer-like thumbs but less prone to slippage.

This wasn't really an option with Gangstar: Crime City, which requires full keypad use to get the most out of the controls. As a game, it's a slick, soulless, frat boy's wet dream of 'da hood' but it showed up the limitations of those flat and slippery keys – we got iced so many times we lost our conviction about global warming.

There's 180MB of internal memory, but no memory card, which limits its appeal as a music player and as a gameplay powerhouse, though it does have stereo Bluetooth.

With the U830, LG has beefed up the tech on its previously feature-light Chocolate series, but there's still the feeling that the style outmarches the substance. We'd have liked a slightly less slippery keypad and a sharper screen, but this is a perfectly decent gaming phone that from a distance looks a million dollars, even if it feels nickel and dime.