LG Optimus One review

The Android market in India has started gaining momentum, with the users craving to experience the fascinating world of Android. Capitalizing on this growing desire as well as the budget conscious Indian consumers, LG has launched a product that fits perfectly well into the  hands of the Indian Android lovers as well as their wallets. We are talking about the recently launched LG Optimus One, the first device in India to run on Android 2.2 also popularly known as Android Froyo. Now Froyo is not just any ordinary mobile platform operating system.

Touted as being a game changer, the leading operating system platform from Google brings in revolutionary features along with a user interface matched by none. Using Froyo mobile users can enjoy a increased speed and performance, almost 2-5 times faster. This means that now searching for food joints, checking emails and downloading apps is so much smoother and faster. Android 2.2 also enables you to convert your device into a portable Wi-Fi hotspot, so you can always have access to the internet and stay connected with your friends and family at all times.

If you love watching videos or playing games, Android 2.2 makes it possible thanks to its browser capabilities which comes with a flash support. And not to mention the thousands of games available for free download from google's Android market.

Impressed with Froyo already, wait till you hear about the LG Optimus one. Before we begin let's take a look at some of the main features of LG Optimus one. LG Optimus one is a lightweight device and comes in dimension of 59X113.5X13.3mm. It sports a TFT, 320X480 pixel with a 3.2"inch display. The phone packs in a 3-mega-pixels camera, image editing, video share and social networking support to popular applications like facbook, twitter and Picassa. As we have already mentioned the Optimus One runs on Android 2.2 (remember all those cool features we just mentioned) and comes packed with some unique features like google Voice search, Android market, google googlers and Google maps with turn by turn navigation.

Priced at Rs 10,299, LG optimus is a budget handset that looks no bit cheap and rather offers features which are normally reserved for high-end handsets. Weighing just 127g, the device comes in a candy bar shape and sports a matte black finish with silver trims. It also comes equipped with a 3.5mm headphone jack input placed on the top while a volume rocker adorns the top right-hand side of the device.

The phone material is made up of plastic with a soft coat finish. The metallic edging running along the navigation key as well as the camera strapped behind the device, adds to the style quotient of the device. Sporting 4 buttons on the front for seamless navigation to home, back, search and settings, works well and comes in quite handy.

The device apart from its amazing cost price, packs in some impressive features. What we feel is a strong point for Optimus One is its resolution. At 320 x 480 pixels, Optimus One offers a crisp and clear pictures and beats even HTC Wildfire in this department which offers pixelated quality of pictures.

Another feature that Optimus One gets a thumbs up from us is its capacitive screen. To those who are are new to the concept, basically capacitive screens don’t rely on pressure, but rather they use electrodes to sense the conductive properties of objects, such as your finger. So, they don't rely on having an object pressing particularly hard on their surface, but will only react to certain objects.

We at Knowyourmobile are not particularly fond of the resistive screens so we were quite delighted to see the Optimus one not compromise on that while picking the features that would fit within the budget.

We were quite happy with the booting speed of the handset too and the swiftness with which we could navigate between homepages and scroll down the app menus. The drawback however which cannot be missed is the relatively small screen size. At 3.2-inch the screen is quite inadequate to experience and enjoy the web browsing, with repeated and unresponsive nature due to the inadequate 600MHz chip adding to the impatience.

LG Optimus comes strapped with a 3 mega-pixel camera at the rear, unfortunately no secondary, forward facing camera has been provided. The camera offers no frills and flash, so if you are looking for a  camera phone, you can easily skip Optimus One. However if you enjoy taking pictures on the fly, this device will suffice. Similarly the video player is simple and somewhat disappointing and plays back a distorted grainy video.

The device comes fully loaded with Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g), 3G, EDGE and GPRS. The internal memory of the device is 170 Mb, which can be extended to 32 GB. LG has thrown in some nice widgets and added subtle touches to the UI of the dialer and contacts.

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