Navigation troubles

These shortcomings might be acceptable if Chocolate's controls weren't so frustrating. One problem is that the controls are all over the device. The most noticeable of the controls is the round touchpad. In the center of that pad is an OK button surrounded by four arrow keys.

Then, there are four keys surrounding the touchpad, three of which have cryptic icons. The top two icons, it turns out, are for executing options shown at the bottom of the display. However, these keys are so far below the display that their purpose is not intuitively obvious. The bottom right button has a hard-to-figure icon that performs the "back" function, while the left bottom icon is a telephone. That button clearly relates to various telephony options such as accessing your recent calls, but it's not immediately clear that the key also is for starting and ending calls.

The four buttons surrounding the touchpad aren't raised or indented but, rather, are flush with the phone. As a result, it often wasn't clear that I had successfully launched a function by touching a button. This problem was exacerbated by an occasional delay of a second or two between pressing the button and the time the action launched. Conversely, it was too easy to brush over one of those keys and accidentally launch a function. You can adjust the pressure used to activate these keys, but I found that made little difference.

In addition, there are keys on the side of the device for increasing or decreasing volume and launching a screen with your music playlists. Some of those functions, such as displaying your music playlists, are duplicated elsewhere in the interface while others aren't.