I had this phone before I got my Blackberry free with a contract, and at the time I thought this was brilliant technology and loved the phone. Looking back, I can see this phone was actually quite basic, although it did everything I asked of it at the time, such as texting and phoning people. It cost me about £100 at the time, as I bought it on a pay-as-you-go package because I didn't want to be tied into a contract. That was a few years ago though so I would expect they have come down in price a fair bit since then.

This phone has the ability to make and receive calls, send and receive text and picture messages, take photos, play music and it has an alarm. It also has Bluetooth, and there are some limited games already on the phone if you like this kind of thing. There is the option to connect to the internet but I found this really slow and also I was on Pay-As-You-Go so it was using all my credit. I didn't really use the internet on this phone, as it was cheaper and quicker just to use my laptop.

The phone is very stylish looking, and is probably a lot more slimline than some modern phones. It's black, with a good sized screen, and decent sized buttons which makes it easy for texting and typing in numbers. To use the phone, you just slide the top half up to reveal the buttons at the bottom. This made it almost impossible to accidentally phone someone when the phone is roaming round your handbag. The only bit that's like a touch screen is the arrows for scrolling through the menu, but these are a good size so it's easy to use.

The camera is reasonable quality, I'm not sure what the exact technical jargon is for it pixel-wise, but you can take snapshots and they look fine when uploaded to your PC. I wouldn't say it's good enough to take all your holiday photos on, but then I don't really know anyone who uses the camera on their phone for this purpose.

I had this phone for a couple of years, and never had any technical issues with it. I did have problems downloading picture messages at one stage but this was down to my provider and got sorted eventually. It has the ability to store a large number of text messages (over 100) which is unusual for a basic phone.

As for the battery life, I think this got worse towards the end of my phone's life, as the battery was clearly struggling so I was charging it every day almost. Until then though it was fine, and only needed charging every few days. I did have to buy a new charger for it after a while as the one that came with the phone stopped working, I think the lead on it was bit flimsy so it broke as a result of me carrying it back and forth to my partner's house (this was when I lived on my own, and I used to carry the charger round in case my phone died and I was cut off from the world).

One thing that really annoyed me about this phone was that when you slide the screen up, it displays the time, but it used to display the PREVIOUS time you'd checked your phone. This can be confusing in the night when you think it's 6am but it's actually 9am and the phone is telling you that you last checked the time at 6am. Sounds stupid, but don't rely on this phone too much for time/clock/alarm features. The alarm would also only work if I left my phone on overnight (not on silent) which was annoying if I had any text messages overnight as they would wake me up.

Overall, this phone served me well, but I am much happier with my Blackberry as I have far fewer gripes and far more features. As a basic phone though, the LG Chocolate KG800 is pretty good.