LG BL20 New Chocolate now live - yes, it's finally official

After so much rumors and leaked shots and specifications, you would hardly imagine that the LG BL20 New Chocolate is not officially announced yet. Well, it is! Or better yet - it was! Today LG finally went live with it officially showcasing the successor of the once popular LG Chocolate to the public for the first time.

After being featured in numerous leaks (and under various names), the BL20 New Chocolate is now official with all the nitty-gritty details available as you might imagine. Of course, if you've been following our homepage, you'd know that the specs of this fella were pretty well known for several days now, but LG somehow refrained from actually announcing it.

LG BL20 New Chocolate

Several years ago LG started the whole Chocolate lineup and mind, you, they did explore the sub-brand success to its fullest releasing not one or two, but at least three separate GSM handsets. We'd hardly be able to count the numerous CDMA offshoots but CDMA is out of our field of interest anyway.

LG BL20 New Chocolate

Besides bringing a dozen of high-quality press images for your high-tech fetish enjoyment, the official information reveals little new facts about the chocolate bar (well, actually a slider).

The new LG Chocolate BL20 phone is a slim (12.3mm) handset with a 5 megapixel autofocus camera. It's not a full touch device, but it does offers a touch sensitive touch pad below the display that only comes alive after you slide the phone open. This time around the side keys - the two volume knobs and the camera key are touch sensitive as well (not quite practical, we would presume).

LG BL20 New Chocolate

The bottom right corner of the navigational touchpad has a Widget Hotkey providing one-touch direct access to four of your most frequently used functions such as Weekly Schedule, Memo, News, Today's Weather or Alarm.

There's also a convenient Clear Memo Capture mode which takes shots of text, handwriting and drawings with the TextScan option as an additional way of storing and inputting info.

Here's the official video demoing all the new features:

Unfortunately, there's no word of the handset featuring some modern features such as an accelerometer, a 3.5mm audio jack, let alone Wi-Fi or GPS. It's not a smartphone alright, but we've seen feature phones offer those by the dozen these days. The BL20 is not supposed to come with some advanced camera features and video recording maxes out at QVGA@15fps.

In other words, the sleek slider should better offer some aggressive pricing or it will have some rather hard time fighting off the competition off its back.

The LG BL20 New Chocolate should be available some time in Q4 2009 in the UK through the O2 network with UK pricing still undisclosed. However the official German LG blog suggests October availability with an MSRP of 269 euro. Seems quite steep, if you ask us.

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