Too wide? That’s a silly question, LG thought when it released the LG BL40 New Chocolate in 2009. With a 4-inch display with a cinematic 21:9 aspect ratio, the phone was unique for its time. was. New HDTV standard. But 21:9 was unprecedented.
Aspect ratio determines to some extent what kind of content is displayed. Early televisions were square in proportion as they primarily displayed the newscaster (basically a vertical image). With more TVs in the home, movie theaters are getting bigger, giving you an experience you can’t get on your couch.
In 1953, 20th Century Fox introduced Cinemascope, with a screen aspect ratio of 2.35, or 21:9 as a fraction. Television broadcasts of movies had to either crop the image to fit the 4:3 tube or use letterboxing (which made small TV displays even smaller). If you wanted a cinematic experience, you had to buy movie tickets.
Fast forward half a century and you have a Cinemascope experience in your pocket. The LG BL40 New Chocolate had a 4 inch TFT LCD with a resolution of 345 x 800px. That’s 1/3 of HD resolution in terms of pixels, but it’s now a solid 217ppi. For comparison, the current iPhone 3GS featured a 3.5-inch 3:2 display with a density of 165ppi. It was the first Galaxy smartphone to have a 3.2-inch 3:2 display with a density of 180ppi.
iPhone and BL40 New Chocolate side by side
This beautiful display needed to be protected from scratches, a duty given to Gorilla Glass. As you can see, in addition to being ultra-wide, it also had a very thick bezel, so the overall size of the phone for him was 128x51x10.9mm (weighing 129g).
The LG BL40 New Chocolate featured a 4-inch 21:9 display (345 x 800 pixels) protected by Gorilla Glass.
Watching movies on the go was clearly this phone’s main attraction. It handled video just fine, but XviD support was spotty. At the time, I wrote, “I hope the final version of the UI fixes all these glitches.”
It was a pre-release unit. After a month, I got a commercial unit for a proper review and was disappointed to find that the situation was reversed. Both codecs stopped him from HD playback. The media player topped out with D1, the resolution usually used for DVDs (he’s 720x480px in the widescreen version).
Both DivX and XviD videos played fine, and the display didn’t handle HD footage very well (again, at 345 pixels on the short side, less than half the HD’s 720 pixels). But the phone did support TV-out (if you bought the right cable), so it would have been nice to have HD support.
Media player failed to handle HD video
If you wanted to watch on the go, Dolby Mobile (the predecessor to Atmos for phones) was available, which worked best with a headset plugged into the 3.5mm jack.
The jack was on the top of the phone, sharing a bright red panel with the power key. Everything about the BL40 New Chocolate screams “Look at me!”, painted bright red on the top and bottom to contrast with piano black on the other side, silver trim with built-in keys on the sides, and the high even support.
While cinematic displays dominated design, phones loved music in much the same way. There was also a button dedicated to launching the music player. We already mentioned the 3.5mm jack, but there was another way to output the music. It’s an FM radio transmitter. It also had Bluetooth 2.1, but this was before the prevalence of high-quality audio codecs and plethora of BT speakers.
LG BL40 New Chocolate
The LG BL40 New Chocolate featured a 5MP camera with a Schneider-Kreuznach certified lens. You might think that LG specifically built it so that he could shoot his impressive home movies on a 21:9 widescreen.
But no, the video recording capabilities were really woefully inadequate. The video was at CIF resolution (352 x 288 pixels) with unpredictable frame rates, typically in the 10-20 fps range. This was 2009 and the first phones with HD video capabilities were already on the market. Even the D1’s resolution would have been fine as long as it matched the playback capabilities of a cell phone, but in exchange it did the processing of a cheap feature phone.
Speaking of which, this was not a decent smartphone. It ran LG’s S-Class UI, which we first saw at the LG Arena. It had a very skeuomorphic look and loaded with 3D animation. LG wanted the spectacle to match the display.
S-class UI focused on visual experience
The UI supported home screen widgets and featured a quick toggle that could be pulled down from the status bar. The system was able to multitask J2ME apps, but had no split screen support. It was perfectly suited for a 21:9 aspect ratio, but required more advanced technology than New Chocolate was built for.
Not just movies, games were another opportunity for a 4-inch ultrawide display. Unfortunately, app stores were just starting to become popular at the time, and the S-Class UI didn’t have one. The phone had a few games pre-installed, but they were all motion controlled for some reason (someone at LG had a Nintendo Wii controller and thought ‘this looks familiar’). seems to have been).
The most interesting game among them was Dual Match. It is so named because two players can play in split screen mode, both holding his one phone. It’s a clever use of a very tall display, but probably not enough to make mobile his gaming hall of fame.
LG BL40 New Chocolate’s dual match offered split-screen multiplayer on one phone
Another piece of fun was not exactly a “game”, but an instrument, being able to play cut-down piano keys and virtual drums.
The new chocolate also had a creative side
The LG BL40 New Chocolate was a feature phone in the smartphone world. It was certainly a unique device, and it would be many years before we saw another 21:9 display.
Would this have been more successful if Android was running on a more powerful chipset? We can only guess, but the answer is probably no. Netflix was still mostly known as his DVD-by-mail company at the time. Those clunky old 3G networks couldn’t handle video streaming.
That put the LG BL40 New Chocolate in the awkward position of being a multimedia phone where users have to provide their own multimedia. Many did just that, but many didn’t (they had his iTunes do it). “New Chocolate” would now be a household name if the service had launched years after Netflix was cheap, data plan costs were falling, and mobile game sales in app stores were booming. Maybe. But the world wasn’t ready for him to put a 21:9 display in his pocket.
