South Korea's LG today brought its KG800 phone - informally dubbed 'Chocolate' - to Europe in the hope the slimline slider handset will experience the same success here as it has back home.

Chocolate's a 9.5 x 4.8 x 1.5cm phone with a 2in, 176 x 220, 256,000-colour display. It's a tri-band (900/1800/1900MHz) GSM/GPRS device with all the usual phone features, plus Bluetooth and USB connectivity. The handset's main controls are touch-sensitive.

It sports a 1.3 megapixel camera with 4x digital zoom and flash. That may be a common camera specification, but its nine-shot continuous shooting feature isn't. The phone's battery provides up to 3.33 hours' talk time and 200 hours on stand-by. There's 128MB of on-board memory.

It's not yet clear how much LG wants for the KG800, but Carphone Warehouse is already offering the handset free of charge with a variety of networks' airtime bundles.

Chocolate's launch comes a month after LG shipped what it claims is the world's first 3G DVB-H handset, the LG-U900. The phone will be released initially in Italy by the 3G network 3, though the carrier plans to offer it in other territories in due course. ®