In 2006, phone makers were obsessed with style. The LG Chocolate line was the poster child for this era: glossy sliders, touch controls, and heavy marketing around “premium” design long before anyone said “glass sandwich.” The KE800 Platinum, a follow-up in LG’s Black Label series, shows exactly how that mindset could both fix old problems and create new, unnecessary ones.
Under the chrome and brand polish, the KE800’s actual tools and games are a strange mix of upgrades, downgrades, and outright head-scratchers. It’s a snapshot of that awkward pre-smartphone phase where software felt more like an afterthought than a core part of the experience.
Tools Menu: Useful, Standard, and Weirdly Limited
The KE800’s Tools menu is full of what you’d expect from a mid-2000s feature phone: Alarm clock, Calculator, Unit converter, World time clock, and a Voice recorder. Nothing flashy, nothing ambitious, just the standard utility pack.
But when you start comparing it directly to the original LG Chocolate (KG800), the story gets messy. LG clearly reworked the software between generations, and not always in a way that benefits the user. Some features genuinely improve day-to-day usability, while others feel like someone hit delete just to hit a deadline.
Alarm Clock: From Five Alarms to Just One
The most obvious regression is the alarm clock. On the KE800, you can only set a single alarm. That alarm can be repeated, but that’s it. One slot.
On the original KG800, you had five different alarms to configure. That’s the kind of flexibility that actually matters in real life: one for weekdays, one for weekends, one as a backup, maybe one for reminders during the day. Losing that and dropping to a single-alarm system is a baffling downgrade.
For a device positioned as the “Platinum” evolution of the Chocolate, this is the kind of cut that makes the phone feel cheaper in practice, even if it looks more expensive on the outside. When your basic alarm clock is objectively worse than last year’s model, that’s not progress.
Calculator: Overkill in the Wrong Direction
On the flip side, the calculator goes in the opposite direction: too much, and in the wrong context. The KE800’s calculator offers rich scientific functions, which is almost comically out of place on this kind of fashion-first slider.
You get advanced capabilities that most users of this phone would never need, while more practical areas of the OS are being simplified or stripped down. It feels like the software team bolted on a more complex calculator module just because they could, not because it fits the device’s role.
In a world where these phones lived in pockets of students and office workers, sure, scientific functions have a niche. But when paired with something as crippled as a single-alarm system, the priorities start to look confused.
Unit Converter: Trimmed Down and Possibly Unfinished
The KE800’s Unit converter is more straightforward. It covers core categories like Area, Length, Weight, and Volume. On its own, that sounds fine.
The problem again comes from comparison. The original Chocolate had a lot more units available to convert between. The KE800’s shorter list suggests either intentional trimming or incomplete software.
There’s even a hint that this might be a pre-final software issue, with the suggestion that the missing units could be added later. But from a user perspective, none of that speculation matters. You’re left with a tool that’s functionally narrower than what LG already shipped before.
Voice Recorder: Finally Done Right
The one unambiguous win here is the Voice recorder. On the older KG800, recordings were capped by duration. On the KE800, that limit is gone. You can record freely within whatever storage you have available.
On top of that, LG upgraded the microphone. The KE800’s mic is described as a lot more sensitive than the one on the KG800. That translates into better capture for voice notes, quick memos, or even impromptu interviews.
This is exactly the kind of generational improvement that makes sense: remove arbitrary limits, improve the hardware input, and you get a tool that actually feels more capable in daily life.
Games: Sudoku and Button-Mashing Rhythm
The entertainment side is minimal but familiar. The KE800 comes with two preinstalled games: SUDOKU Puzzle and Pump It Up.
Sudoku is the intellectual option here. It’s a logical puzzle game with a lot of mathematics involved, which fits the era when Sudoku was everywhere from newspapers to handhelds. It’s the kind of quiet, time-killing game that works well on a small display and simple controls.
Pump It Up is more reflex-driven. The game uses the alphanumeric keypad as your input surface. Visual prompts appear on-screen, and you have to press the corresponding keys as quickly and precisely as possible. The better your timing and accuracy, the more points you rack up.
Neither title is going to sell the phone on its own, but both are solid examples of what pre-smartphone gaming looked like: lightweight, key-driven, and built to fill a bus ride rather than an evening.
Mixed Progress: Fixing Old Issues, Creating New Ones
The bigger story around the KE800 Platinum is one of partial progress. LG clearly listened to feedback and fixed some of the original Chocolate’s flaws. The phonebook, called out previously as a major issue, reportedly received most of the upgrades it needed. That’s a genuine positive.
But the phone still leaves “a good number” of issues hanging, and worse, introduces new ones. The tools and apps perfectly illustrate that contradiction: the voice recorder is freed from limits and made more sensitive, while the alarm goes from five slots to one and the unit converter loses options.
You can see the intent: refine the Black Label series, polish the software, and ship a more mature version of a popular fashion phone. Instead, the KE800 ends up feeling like an uneven patch release—stronger in a few useful places, randomly weaker in others.
For enthusiasts who care about how phones actually work day-to-day, that kind of inconsistency is more annoying than any missing feature on a spec sheet. If you owned the original Chocolate, you’d notice immediately where the KE800 is better—and exactly where it lets you down.
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