With Chocolate a runaway success, LG's follow-up handset lands to high expectations. There's no doubting that it's a sexy little beast, and the innovative scroll wheel promises to make navigation a doddle, but can this cellphone be as sweet as its minimalist predecessor?

First things first; man, this is a gorgeous phone. From that headline-catching mirrored display to the brushed metal body and pleasing heft, it's not only attractive but feels well put together, too. The slide action flicks out with a solid click, and while I'm sure the first time you drop it will inevitably be a heart-in-mouth moment I would be very surprised if you did any real damage.

Let's stick with the positives for a little while longer. LG's interface, something I wasn't familiar with, is straightforward to navigate and, while interesting to look at, doesn't sacrifice usability for visual flourish. The 2.2-inch, QVGA screen is clear and colourful, and visibility suffers very little from that reflective coating; photographing it, however, is another matter, and it proved very difficult to get reasonable pictures for this review. In use, though, it fares far better.

The camera is a pretty standard 2-megapixel offering, although LG would have you believe that the autofocus and Schneider-Kreuznach certified lens raise it above that of competing models. Actual results are only fair, however, and certainly not up to the quality of, say, Sony Ericsson's K800i. The built-in LED 'flash' makes low-light photography an option, although given its anemic power you'd have to be capturing shots of something pretty close to you.

Music support fares better, then, with expandable storage via microSD adding to the 50mb of onboard memory for files of MP3, MPEG4, WAV, 3GP and AAC/AAC+/AAC++ flavours. A notable omission to that list is WMA, which might disappoint Windows users who have been happily ripping their CDs to Microsoft's heavily compressed format. Assuming your files are of the right type, then, you can use either USB or Bluetooth to transfer them; the DAP software itself is relatively basic, with only ten preset equaliser modes (for instance "Jazz" and "3D") to play with. As for sound quality, I guess LG thought a standard 3.5mm headphones jack wouldn't be in keeping with the handset's slinky lines as it uses a proprietary connector (that's also the charging port). Things are made a little better with the headphones in-line controls, operating pause/play and track skipping, as well as call answering.

Like much of the phone's functionality, the mp3 player makes heavy use of the Shine's scrollbar. Here, sadly, the review makes a slight turn for the worse. It's a great idea: a broad, thumbable wheel for nipping through menus and quickly scanning down your contacts list, with flanking buttons for left and right duties. In practice, however, it's severely let down by vastly fluctuating sensitivity. It can take a few good flicks to get things moving on-screen, however when it comes to selecting an option - since pressing the scroll acts to select - there's a very high chance that at the very last moment your carefully navigated selection will slip up or down and you'll end up in the wrong menu.

If it was just the scrollbar that was temperamental, I could perhaps forgive the Shine; sadly the keypad is even worse. Despite looking very similar to the V3 RAZR's pleasantly responsive acid-etched panel, entering text or numbers on the LG is a haptic nightmare. For a start the balance between size and firmness isn't right - they're too hard to press without also pressing a neighbouring key - and the situation isn't helped with the lack of differentiation between each button. You're forced to jab carefully with a fingernail, at which point they flex and bend worryingly.