The LG Optimus One Trial Part two.

Hello Everyone! :)

It's been a while and many a problem to sort out behind the scenes so for that I apologise.
But, as promised. Part two of the optimus one review is here.

The LG Optimus One's is a darned sturdy feeling device. with power/lock button and headphone jack on the top, volume rocker on the top right and four buttons on the front of the device and last but not least the capacitive touchscreen.
On the back of the device is the 3.15mp Camera which comes with autofocus and without flash

It's Rocking Android 2.2 with flash support, and as previously mentioned LG have been quite good not to customise without making a hash of it. Looking at the home screen it's tidy and scrolling between the 5 or 7 home screens (you choose) brings a fluid scrolling experience .

The menus still confuse the daylights out of me, as basic things i would expect in a menu are buried in other parts of applications and settings. That said I've only JUST got used to using the text input on the device.

As were here lets move to inputting text on the device.
The device has three keypads installed, the LG Keyboard and Alphanumeric and the Android default one, the image on the right shows the android default at the top and the LG one below.

I admit the text input is an enormous learning curve, as I'm used to belting it out on a slide out keyboard has proven to be one of the largest learning curves I have to overcome, and the experience nearly killed the whole feel of the phone for me, but this in fairness is due to my learning experience with the handset, not the phones fault. And last night I spent a good few hours playing with the keypad to master it.

Now, lets move to browsing.

The browsing experience is a pleasure. An experience compatible to the iPod touch, We did have he occasional wobble with flash content, although this was due to Adobe and it's partners delay in sending the update. But this does not kill the experience, in fairness it works well, Google really have done a good job with the browser.

The device has shown me that a lower end device can trump the competition and do it spectacularly well too even with a few quirks like the lack of interactive flash content and youtube content, though the latest flash update is on the way.

Using this for social networking is a dream. Youtube, Twitter and Facebook work out of the box. slap your details in and you're good to go, with all applications feeling quite complete, and no feelings of slowness or instability, well. Until I play games then we see an issue.

For instance Angry Birds by Rovio. This can work perfectly, then suddenly grind so a crawl. in a way it's reminiscent of playing Doom on my first pc. Slow and painful at times but still fun.
in fairness I feel the advertising in the app are the problem there. (if LG want me to keep the device I may be able to try more paid apps)
It's a good performer there, but there are newer devices that will outperform it in more demanding tasks, but for the price it's good!

One thing that amazes me is the Wifi connectivity. it's rarely failed me at all. even connecting to free providers with ease. The configuration is confusing but works well.

The camera is a good performer. I would say it's in par with the Nokia E71 without the purple hue. (images will be on flickr soon, I'm still tagging things now)

Music and video quality is spot on with this device, coming from the LG headphones or my Sony high end set both bring crisp audio with the right amount of bass.

Call quality has been strange. Now I use a Vodafone Sure Signal inside the flat, giving a HSDPA signal inside the house, as n extra mast. Now at times it dislikes the witchcraft of a home mast leaving call quality as useless, but the rest of the time it's sharp and crisp. they have done an excellent job on the voice quality on this device.

Now for the important bit. Would I buy this?

I would say Yes, yes I really would. It works flawlessly. any problems are mainly my learning curve, and it does show from my use it has to be doing something right to sell over a million devices. so Top Work LG.

I have to say the Keyboards Image is not mine and is from the following blog. Please go and say hello to Miss Tin A Pie as a way to say thanks
http://misstinapie.blogspot.com/2010/12/urban-adventures-switching-to.html

For now Part three is coming. the final chapter of the LG optimus one. My final thoughts on this device.

For now - PEACE!

Paul :)

The LG Optimus One Review. Part one

Hello everyone.

Today is part one of a three part review of the LG Optimus one android device.
As a devout Symbian follower from the early days of Epoc, the transition to Google's Android Operating system is going to be a huge learning curve.

Now the phone packs the following specs

• 600 MHz ARM 11 processor, Adreno 200 GPU, Qualcomm MSM7227 chipset.
• 3.2 inch capacitive touchscreen, 256K colours 320 x 480 pixels,
• 512 MB ram
• 170 MB Internal user memory
• 2GB Micro SD provided, can take up to 32GB
• Android 2.2 (The all important Froyo) To be updated to 2.3 around May...
• 3.5g (7MB HSDPA) and Wifi access.
• GPS for Sat nav or fitness tracking apps.

On power up I did notice a little fluff up on LG's end, they forgot to remove personal information from the previous users trial. This is not impressive when you have someone's family contacts (mother and nan ect...) however the device has been reset and as the persoal info is now cleared so no harm done in the long run.

Now onto the general feel of the phone.

Now this may be newbie experiences here, so i may be a little slow on how the device works. This does not mean i'm going to slate the device to hell and back and should not be taken as such. I may be a nokia purist, but I know symbian is slowly dying a slow death thanks to Nokia messing about so much.

In fairness I was expecting a fast and easy to use experience from first use. and owing to my lack of experience with android the device will take a bit of getting used to.

Eventually i'm all sorted. Twitter and facebook all work effortlessly. I plan to try and use seesmic for both social networks.

The one thing that stood out was the screen resolution. It really does not feel that the screen is lower resolution than the nokia c6, n97 and the 5230, but it does not feel like it. Although wider in the hand it feels sturdy, solid and i sense it could take some stick.I can really see why this device has sold over one million handsets.

My only complaints so far is some applications seem very slow to run, which could be due to many factors. So is not too much of an issue. (I'm used to it on symbian). And it seems like a PDA first and a phone second. again this could be a newbie feeling and i'll see how that goes over the week.

For now. This is my inital thoughts on the device. Later in the week i'll have a more detailed look at the device in general.

Paul :)