Mobile

All I can think about when watching this hands-on video with LG’s super-long BL40 Chocolate touchscreen phone is that we’ve been using the phrase “candybar phone” way too loosely for the last few years.

Here’s the thing: It’s been clear since the earliest teases that the BL40 is a streeeeeetched phone, to the point that LG had to design a few special interface elements to take advantage of—or to work around—the screen’s odd proportions. But in promo videos, the BL40 just looked a little, I don’t know, bigger. Here, cradled in a young Englishman’s hands, this 21:9 chunk of hardware looks more like a compact remote than a mobile phone.

That said, the software still looks impressive and runs very smoothly, aside from a little choppiness during multitouch zooming. It’s hard to judge such an unexpectedly different device without laying hands on one—it may look a mite silly, but usability is still a total wildcard. [Mobiles.co.uk—Thanks, Daniel!]