LG Chocolate
The glossy black slider whose touch keys glowed red like something from the future — half phone, half candy bar, all status symbol. In the gap between the RAZR and the iPhone, the LG Chocolate was the coolest object in the mall.
The LG Chocolate launched in South Korea in November 2005 as the first phone in LG's premium Black Label Series, and its design pitch was immediate: a slim glossy slider with touch-sensitive keys that glowed red beneath the surface, hidden until the phone woke up. Slide it open and the touch controls activated; leave it closed and it read less as a phone than as a sleek, minimal black slab. The design won both iF and Red Dot design awards before it even reached Europe.
It sold like its namesake. The Chocolate moved 600,000 units in South Korea in a bit over half a year, then 1.4 million in its first three months across European, Asian, and Latin American markets after the international KG800 arrived in mid-2006. Americans got theirs when the VX8500 hit Verizon stores on August 7, 2006 — marketed as a fashion phone with music playback front and center, arriving in the thick of the iPod era, when portable music hardware was the definition of cool. By April 2007 LG had shipped 10 million Chocolates; by December 2007, 15 million; the family eventually passed 20 million units.
Owning one felt like the future — the red glow was a flex in any dark movie theater. The LG Shine succeeded it in the Black Label line, and then the iPhone rewrote what a status phone even was. The Chocolate stands as a perfect artifact of the last era when phones competed on sculpture instead of screens: a gorgeous, slightly impractical object from the final golden age of the gadget phone.
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