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So, you can imagine how delighted I was to be among the earliest in the country to preview the Chocolate when LG Malaysia passed me one earlier this week. Yes, the Chocolate will be launched nationwide covering 9 cities in Malaysia, with Kuala Lumpur kicking off on May 29.

FORM FACTOR. The LG KG800… okay okay, the Chocolate, is slim true to sense, packing a 9.5 x 4.8 x 1.5cm black body that comes with a 2-inch, 176 x 220 pixel, 256,000-colour TFT Screen. It's a tri-band GSM/GPRS device (sufficient for me to access the US GSM networks) complete with a 1.3-megapixel camera that handles a 4x digital zoom and supports a 9-shot continuous shooting. Storage is embedded 128MB built-in memory. There is Bluetooth and USB connectivity, and it’s slim enough to nestle coyly on my palm. Nano-inspired?

Wrapping it up is a fibreglass body that is said to be immune to scratches from the usual suspects like coins and keys that you normally keep in the wallet or the pocket alongside the mobilephone.

The Chocolate looks minimalist on the outside, but the feature I like most is the sensor-touch keypad, and the controls that smoulder a deep red, and the LCD that glows when activated, i.e. when it’s slided open. That’s where, on the flipside of the slided LCD, the camera appears and ready to shoot. Let me hasten to say that, unlike my Year 2000 first-generation WAP phone, the spring-loaded slide mechanism works very smoothly on the Chocolate. Very chocolatey as smoothness can be.

It, however, does take a little bit of getting used to when working on the sensor-touch controls. (That’s what you’d experienced with your first iPod, ain’t it?) My initial scepticism of the LCD clarity goes away the moment the screen comes on live. Made to look part of the fibreglass body, the Chocolate's screen is crisp and clear though I tend to smudge it with my fingerprints rather easily. It’s a glossy black body, anyway.

FUNCTIONALITY. As a person dabbling in multimedia content and applications, I have a high level of expectation for a handphone. If it is to play MP3 and video clips, it had better be good. Surprisingly, the Chocolate is, not 100%, but quite measurable to Sony-Ericsson K700i that my wife has, which envies me a lot for its polyphonic audio quality.

The Chocolate has a rather intuitive User Interface (UI). So, the first menu function that I peeped into was the multimedia feature. Seven presets are laid out nicely, namely camera, video camera, voice recorder, MP3, photo album, video album and setting. I try all.

As I have said, I am quite impressed with the audio quality after playing several MP3 clips that are Bluetooth-ed from my notebook. That done, I try out the camera, exerting my demand as a serious amateur photographer using a digital SLR. No big deal with a 1.3-megapixel configuration and a 256K LCD, but the pictures and videos taken with Chocolate are watchable for daylight recordings, and lens focussing is relatively fast. I will test-and-stress this feature further in the next few days.

The set that I have comes bundled with a java-game, named ZooZoo Club. No, I am too old and too busy for that.

Here it is for now, just a quick check-it-out as I have the Chocolate unwrapped. I'll let it ‘melt’ in my mouth in the days to come. Come back again (www.jeffooi.com/toolbox) and I will update you with some photo-shoots and MMS deliveries.

I know Juliet would be reasonably happy with Chocolate's 1,000-entry address book capacity. I'll text her now.

For further details on LG Chocolate Black Temptation Series, visit: http://my.lgmobile.com.