Particularly useful is its bright 240-by-320-pixel color display, which is easy on the eyes. It also supports voice commands, an increasingly common but still useful feature. It has built-in Bluetooth connectivity that can be used for headphones or for connecting to a PC for tasks like transferring music files.

The device's most notable features, however, are those that support the media functions. For example, it has a built-in microSD storage slot that can hold an optional storage card with a capacity as high as 2GB. In addition, once you've downloaded music, you can use those tunes for ring tones.

Sound quality both for the phone and music player is decent, although unexceptional. Battery life is rated at three hours of either talking or downloading and playing music. This is unexceptional battery life for a phone and downright poor for a music player; some dedicated players have a battery life of 20 hours or more. Put differently, don't expect to use Chocolate for listening to music on a long flight and then make a call as soon as you've landed.

It surely will be useful to some to be able to download songs directly to the phone from virtually anywhere. Not surprisingly, Verizon Wireless charges a premium for that convenience -- $1.99 per tune -- although you get a free download of the same song to your PC. Verizon also quite reasonably enables you to download songs directly to your PC for the industry-standard 99 cents per song and transfer the song to your phone, thus saving you money and Verizon bandwidth.

However, the service has its drawbacks. For instance, you can download only individual tunes to the phone, not an entire CD. In addition, the service's selection of 1.3 million available songs is significantly less than the more than 2 million tracks offered by services such as iTunes, Rhapsody and Napster, although Verizon says it plans to catch up. And the phone doesn't have digital rights management capabilities to enable you to use those competing services. This device is strictly for use with V CAST Music and music you've ripped from CDs.