LG Optimus 2X Review
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The Android 2.2 Froyo interface hasn't been over-the-top skinned by LG. We have a dock at the bottom of the display, which is always present both in the homescreens, and in the main menu. It is slightly transparent, and hosts four shortcuts - to the Phone, Contacts and Messaging apps, as well as to the main menu or the homescreen, depending where you are in the interface.
Naturally, we have a bunch of widgets, folders and shortcuts we can place on the homescreens. The LG widgets you can see below - a couple of clocks and time management ones, as well as news, social networking and multimedia widgets - nothing new here. The weather widget uses AccuWeather.com to pull its info from.
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The interface of the LG Optimus 2X | |||
We especially liked the Calendar widget, since it presented both our near and far upcoming events in a clean manner. LG should have made it possible to fit the Social Feed and My Status widgets on one homescreen, instead of having to look at one screen for Facebook or Twitter updates, and then go to another to post our status.
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Calendar | |||
You can change the main menu from list grid view to page view, which brings in a nice glowing red line with the page number on it, and you can also create app categories. Scrolling and overall performance in the interface is very fluid, as we can expect from the most powerful Android handset on the market. No matter how many apps we ran at once, we couldn't choke the 1GHz dual-core NVIDIA Tegra 2 chipset, even though the phone has 380MB of user-available RAM. It once scored 2777 on Quadrant, and 74.4fps per second on Neocore, which makes it the fastest stock handset we've seen so far.
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You can change the main menu styles | |||
We will make a segway here to explain what are the current and future bragging rights of having a dual-core phone. For now the most useful advantage is the ability to record and play Full HD 1080p video. More detailed videos is a nice thing to have, but in reality the difference with HD 720p video is not that huge, if you are not watching it on a Full HD-capable display.
Moreover, there are single-core phones, which also claim the ability to record 1080p video, like the upcoming Samsung Infuse for AT&T, simply because the 1.2GHz Hummingbird chipset in it is powerful enough to allow Full HD. The main advantages are coming when there is software written specifically for dual-core, but for now you are only getting the bragging rights.
We ran a few standardized tests on the dual-core LG Optimus 2X against last year's finest the Samsung Galaxy S, and have a couple of charts to share.
The LG Optimus 2X performed better in almost all of the tests, except for close results in a 3D graphics test, where it managed only about 13% more frames per second than the Samsung Galaxy S.
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In browser benchmarks, on the other hand, the NVIDIA Tegra 2 1GHz dual-core chipset inside the LG Optimus 2X really shined. It delivered thanks to the Symmetrical Multiprocessing (SMP) capabilities of ARM's multi-core Cortex-A9 chips like Tegra 2. Recent changes in the Webkit code, what we have in the Android browser, allow for taking advantage of multiple CPU cores when rendering websites.
For example, when a single-core chipset encounters some script on a Web page, it stalls other tasks until the script is executed, whereas if there is one more core, they continue fetching the page from the server in parallel, thus speeding up the load times quite a bit. Indeed we saw much faster performance both in benchmarks like SunSpider (JavaScript rendering) or GUIMark2 (Flash and HTML5), as well as in actual page load times.
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The full comparison chart set can be found here.
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27 Comments
2. Prodigy (unregistered) posted on 01 Feb 2011, 11:01 2 2
Well, it seems that Atrix will eat this one at breakfast.
You should compare the LG screen with an Samsung Galaxy or a Nexus S. Not an iPhone...
10. jroc74 posted on 02 Feb 2011, 03:55 2 0
I dont think so. If anything they are gonna be neck n neck. The UI, stock software on this seems better than what Moto offers.
.
If you mean the docking features.....no phone can even come close to the Atrix for that.
.
But overall, I would put in this order: Atrix .....LG 2X and Bionic tied probably for next.
11. jroc74 posted on 02 Feb 2011, 04:08 0 0
Oh and I forgot, those low light pics for this phone....very nice.
3. kasha (unregistered) posted on 01 Feb 2011, 11:31 0 0
Is the rim made of metal? Or is it plastic painted in silver?
Please also show the cover flow music player when holding the 2X horizontally. Its the slickest interface I've seen, as I saw it on Youtube.
Also please try to take photos under low light environment. Again on Youtube and other sites I saw the camera takes pretty good photos and videos with dim lighting
4. kasha (unregistered) posted on 01 Feb 2011, 11:33 0 0
Thanks for the review. Its a nice early review but don't feel very thorough.
5. iwebdroidberry7 posted on 01 Feb 2011, 14:18 4 0
The keyboard and messaging reminds me of the iPhone.
6. surethom posted on 01 Feb 2011, 15:30 2 1
Having NO Led Notification light is the silly mistake & the no 1 reason LG has stopped me from giving them my money I will have to give my £ to Motorola or HTC then.
7. cheetah2k posted on 01 Feb 2011, 18:47 0 0
Reading this review was like an "anti-climax" to what early reviews called the LG 2X - "a revolutionary handset"..
Now that its here, it might be worth while waiting for the Moto Atrix to arrive in 900/2100Mhz HSDPA flavours, and then compare the two again. Hopefully the other makers have their dual core handsets out by then too.
The most disappointing thing for me is that I just wish LG released it with Gingerbread, but I guess we have to consider where LG 2X has been borne, and the fact that it hasn't come from a long line of decent handsets.
So, looks like I'll be hanging onto my Nexus S for a few more months then :-p
8. kasha (unregistered) posted on 01 Feb 2011, 19:57 2 1
Just for your info, LG promised to upgrade to 2.3 for 2X later, and this review misses quite some details. The review seemed rather rushed and didn't tested thoroughly (e.g. horizontal Cover Flow music player, photo under low light condition, etc.)
However, LG do not much good history of high end phone.
Moto has a very bad reputation of future OS update outside US so this time I won't consider Moto again. Their customer service is near non-existence
Nexus S is very nice and I considered it too! But its too plasticky for me when I tried in the shop
I'll wait for others to review the phone more thoroughly to give a better picture of LG 2X
12. guest (unregistered) posted on 02 Feb 2011, 19:33 0 1
AMOLED should be the standard for screen comparison and not the IPS LCD of iPhone. Too bad, it's what they got in their pockets.
14. lol (unregistered) posted on 03 Feb 2011, 09:35 0 0
It's a nice phone but camera not that good and by the way the IPS LCD screen better than super AMOLED in terms of reality color and brigtness that's why samsung wave 2 it's super IPS LCD and the good things about LG the call quality better than any Andriod phone even than samsung galaxy s
23. guest (unregistered) posted on 27 Feb 2011, 19:16 0 0
Get your facts straight. Samsung Wave II is Super Clear LCD and not IPS LCD. It's not Super AMOLED because of shortage.
Also,
http://www.gsmarena.com/display_shootout-review-541p7.php
SAMOLED>IPS LCD in terms of contrast and color rendition. PA should not have compared two IPS LCD's, there's just not point.
15. surethom posted on 04 Feb 2011, 03:09 2 2
NO LED notification light, that is stupid, well LG, I will give my £ to HTC or Motorola, silly mistake DONT follow Silly Samsung.
17. babara (unregistered) posted on 05 Feb 2011, 23:43 3 1
Why do you keep targeting on the issue of the missing notification lights? Are you a three year old who is fascinated by some blinking light? Grow up! One comment is enough!
Most of the users do not need some irritating light that announces to the whole world that we have incoming messages or emails. It might be a cool feature but absolutely not critical in smart phones.
If you are looking out for something like this in a smart phone, I'm glad that you will not be carrying a 2X, because you are a disgrace to the smart phone users.
16. AlonShtrafun posted on 04 Feb 2011, 14:28 0 0
Looks like a no brainer to me. It's fast, it records full HD, and the stills aren't that horrible either. LG didn't customize Android or the phone design too much, keeping it all simple. Looks like a really well-balanced phone. And balanced is good.
Sure the Atrix is great as well, but all those docking stations cost money, and I already have a laptop thank you. HDMI out is good enough for me. Altough the fingerprint reader on the Atrix is a truly great idea, too bad LG or anybod else for that matter won't take it on-board.
18. Eingild (unregistered) posted on 06 Feb 2011, 01:04 0 0
I hope Joven was the one who reviewed this phone. He would probably do more justice on the handset rather than the one speaking on this video. No offense.
20. KitPogi (unregistered) posted on 09 Feb 2011, 23:01 0 0
WoW! and to think this device would be another Iphone Killer! it is exactly like the FREAK'N IPHONE! Failed! Big time failure....
21. Eingild (unregistered) posted on 12 Feb 2011, 23:04 0 0
A great handset like this should be reviewed by Joven. I don't quite get it.
