The Chocolate is a black glass slab that does not look like a phone until you slide it open, and the first thing LG did when they showed it to me was hold it face down on a table so I could see nothing at all. That is the pitch. It is an object first and a handset second, and I think LG has understood something about this market that the engineering-led vendors are going to spend the next two years pretending is not happening.
Motorola got here first, obviously. The Razr is the reason every product manager in Seoul and Espoo spent last year being asked why their phone is not thinner, and the Razr is not a good phone. It is a good shape. It sold enormously anyway, and the lesson the industry took from it was that people will forgive a lot of software misery in exchange for something that looks right in a hand.
LG has taken that lesson further than Motorola did. The materials here are better, the finish is better, and the red backlighting on the touch keys is the kind of detail that costs real money and shows up nowhere on a spec sheet. Those touch keys are also the part I dislike most. They are worse than buttons in every way that matters: you cannot find them without looking, they register presses you did not intend, and they are useless with one hand while walking. I have watched three different people fumble the same call. It will not matter even slightly to sales.
That is the uncomfortable part for anyone who cares about how phones actually work. The camera is unremarkable, the software underneath is the same LG software as everything else in the range, and none of that is the point. The Chocolate is going to do well because it photographs beautifully in a magazine and feels expensive in a shop, and those two things now outrank whether the thing is pleasant to use for a year.
What I want to know, and cannot answer yet, is whether this works twice. Fashion runs on novelty. Motorola is discovering that a shape everybody already owns stops being desirable, and their answer so far has been to make the same shape again in different colours. If LG treats Black Label as a design house with a real cadence rather than one hit and a series of repaints, they will take share from people who out-engineer them. If they treat it as a paint job, the Chocolate will look dated by Christmas and the phones underneath will still be ordinary.
I would put money on the repaints, and I would like to be wrong.