LG Optimus One Review

Introduction:

LG revealed back in July that it will launch ten smartphones in a newly-coined Optimus line by year-end. For now it looks like an even mix of Android and WP7 devices will be in it, and LG will be topping it off with a dual-core smartphone, and a Honeycomb-running tablet. In the initial announcement, the Optimus line naturally started with the Optimus One, and the Optimus Chic, both of which are running Froyo.

LG's marketing team is all over the handset – unortodox promo videos included. It threw a party in London recently, dedicated to the LG Optimus One, mixing it with some celebrities, so in the next few pages we are going to review the party animal, and check how it fares for a starting point of the Optimus line...

Design:

The LG Optimus One looks and feels quite contemporary. There is soft-touch coating all around the phone, interrupted only by the four nice, clickable Android buttons below the 3.2” screen, the 3MP camera on the back, and the chrome-like bezel. The metallic rim is thin around the top, and widens in the bottom half. The volume rocker on the right side, and the lock/power button at the top are designed to be a part of the thin half, and thus hard to find and press.



You can compare the LG Optimus One with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

The bezel also wraps around the 3.5mm audio jack on the top, and the microUSB port at the bottom, for an uninterrupted, stylish accentuation of the chrome on black concept. Since the LG Optimus One is not so thin  at 13.3 mm (0.52”), or light at 129 g (4.55 oz), it actually matches its price point as far as physical dimensions are concerned.



The 3.2” capacitive touchscreen is rather basic as specs (320x480 pixels of resolution, 262 000 colors), but decent in terms of sunlight visibility, viewing angles and responsiveness. The color gamut and contrast could be wider, but at this price point, sacrifices are inevitable. The rounded design, with nice soft-touch coating front and back make the LG Optimus One a pleasure to hold. The chrome-like bezel, and the elevated plate for the two most used Android buttons in the front, add just the grain of pizzazz required to make the handset stand out in the sea of Android design mediocrity. 

Interface, Messaging and Functionality:

The nicest part of the LG Optimus One’s software is, of course, that it is running Android 2.2 from the very beginning. LG hasn’t skinned it too much. The dock at the bottom of the homescreens has grown to accommodate two more shortcuts than standard, for a total of five – Dialer, Contacts, Main Menu, Messages and Browser. Nothing extraordinary in the widgets section – the default homescreen comes with Weather prepopulated, and the rest of them host Calendar, Messaging, Music and Bookmarks from the onset. As usual, you can link your Facebook, Twitter, Exchange and Gmail accounts to your phonebook, and follow what’s happening on the social networking front with your contacts from there.


Most everything else, though – the lock screen, main menu, mail, messaging, gallery, even the calendar, is stock. In order to view the calendar for the first time, you have to log in with your Gmail or Exchange account, which is a strange enough requirement, if you ask us, given that you already provided that info in the initial setup. The same thing happens with Android Market, and the other places requiring the Google login.


Nothing out of the ordinary in the messaging and email department, as we mentioned – both allow you to search the ins and outs of your communication, attach various items, and the email app lets you easily set your Exchange, Hotmail or Yahoo account, if you have strayed away from El Goog for some reason. Typing those messages on the 3.2” screen is easy with the stock Android keyboard, although LG provides its own setup as default, which we quickly switched over to the regular stuff. Not that the LG keyboard arrangement was bad, but we are more used to QWERTY in portrait mode, even on a small screen, rather than the numpad provided by default. Overall, the interface won’t “wow” you, but it is very close to a stock Froyo experience, which already means decent.




Browser, Connectivity and Software:

Surfing the net with the Froyo browser is usually a gratifying experience, due to the full Adobe Flash support, and simple interface. However, the LG Optimus One, as most other handsets with relatively slow chipsets, lacks Adobe Flash 10.1 support, which kind of misses the point of having Froyo to an extent. Scrolling gets choppy when there are some Flash elements on the page, but other than that, multitouch and double-tap work alright. Overall, we can easily say that we've tested better preforming Froyo browsers on the same 600MHz chipsets.


The LG Optimus One arrives with a decent set of connectivity features – 3G, Wi-Fi, A-GPS (which takes about four minutes for a cold start, but locked position for thirty seconds afterwards), as well as Bluetooth and FM Radio. Besides the stock Android apps and Google services, LG has added just Facebook and Twitter apps, as well as ThinkFree Office for easy document editing, which shoots two birds with one stone, as it also acts as a decent file browser.

Camera and Multimedia:

Thetouch-optimized camera interface of LG adds a few capabilities tospruce up the default 3MP shooter with no flash. There are a fewpresets, such as Portrait, Landscape, Sports, Night and Sunset, Macroand Face tracking, as well as a rich set of shooting modes – Continuousmode, Smile shot, LG’s trademark Beauty shot, Art shot, Panorama, Faceeffect and…  Cartoon. Face effect is pretty cool as it makes a mockeryof your subjects, giving them big heads, adding concave or fish-eyeregimes. The camera software also offers a few color effects, ofcourse, of which Solarize, Negative Sepia and Blue are thenon-standard.


Thepictures themselves are with enough detail for a 3MP shooter, but theLG Optimus One fails to focus well on anything but the center of theframe, making them appear blurred. The noise suppression took away alot of detail from the indoor samples. The phone captures VGA videowith accurate color representation, but at 17fps it is nothing to writehome about.




LG Optimus One Sample Video:



The standard Android gallery withits 3D effects while scrolling media files, as well as the stock musicplayer are what is used for multimedia consumption on the LG OptimusOne. The gallery is very good, but the music player offersthe basics – the coolest part is the Party Shuffle feature, which justpicks tracks at random, and that’s about it. The loudspeaker is ofaverage quality in terms of volume/range, and, as usual with the LGphones of late, doubles as an earspeaker.



Video playback supports Divx/Xvid codecs, which is a great feat, and those videos played nicely up to 420x260 pixels of resolution.

Performance and Conclusion:

As a calling device, the LG Optimus One functions decently, with clear voices in the earspeaker. Our callers said they were unable to hear us very distinctly, and the volume output was a tad low. The handset has a generous 1500mAh which lasts 7.5 hours in 3G mode, according to the manufacturer.

What we saw in the LG Optimus One is a set of features, which match the asking price – nice capacitive touchscreen, smooth interface, various codecs support, and pleasant design. We’d like to see better pictures in low light situations, a more fluid browser, or adequate support of Adobe Flash, but adding a faster chipset or LED flash to the camera would have bumped up the price, so we get what’s on offer – a quite decent Froyo handset at price that would put feature phones to shame.

If you are looking for something else in this price point, running Android, and you can’t step away from brand names, the Samsung Galaxy 3 will get you there, especially when it gets the Android 2.2 update, but the LG Optimus One has the cooler design.

LG Optimus One Video Review: