LG Optimus L3 II Review

Introduction:

The LG Optimus L3 II is an extremely affordable and basic Android smartphone with a tiny 3.2-inch display. It also happens to be the successor to last year’s Optimus L3 and just like it, the new phone is made for budget-conscious buyers.

For them, the Optimus L3 II offers a compact form factor, perfectly usable with a single hand, a contemporary version of Android, 4.1 Jelly Bean and fairly long battery life. But will those make up for the trade-offs of a small low-res display and does the processor hamper down performance? Ultimately, is it worth buying? Read on to find out the answers to these questions.

Design:

Plastic and compact are two words that best describe the LG Optimus L3 II. It feels decidedly cheap but at the same time it has no moving parts and is put together solidly. L3 II is a chubby little thing with thickness of 0.47 inches (11.9mm). The compact dimensions make this less of a deal than it would have been on a larger device. The phone is very lightweight too at 3.88oz or 110g. It fits nicely in the hand and no effort is required in operating it single handedly.



There is a single physical home key right in the center and it is surrounded with an LED light that shines red when charging, green when the battery is full and in various colors when the alarm sounds off. Around the home key, there is a back and menu key. The lock key is on top and the volume rocker on the left hand side, and both are comfortable to press, with a nice reassuring click.


Display:

LG Optimus L3 II features a 3.2-inch IPS display with a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels. That is a low resolution screen making icons look fuzzy and text hard to read unless you zoom in. In technical terms, the pixel density comes at 125ppi.

On a positive note, colors on the screen definitely look punchy and viewing angles are fairly good.

We wish there was a light sensor that would allow the screen brightness to adjust automatically but alas LG has not included one. Luckily, the brightness slider is integrated in the notification dropdown so it’s fairly easy to manually tune it.



Interface and Functionality:

The L3 II runs on Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean and this is probably the biggest improvement in comparison to last year’s Optimus L3. The predecessor to this handset only ran on Android 2.3 Gingerbread which is terribly dated now.

Good news is that out of the box the interface runs fairly fluidly. Its usability is somewhat hindered by the small screen which makes accurate typing on the on-screen keyboard difficult. This will be something to consider for heavy texters.

LG has thrown in its own software tweaks on top of Jelly Bean, and most of them we like. The notification dropdown contains important shortcuts to oft-used features like Wi-Fi connectivity. LG’s Quick Memo function that allows you to hand-write on top of the screen and save this for later is a neat addition.


Many would be buying such an affordable phone for their elderly relatives, and LG has also thought about this including its Safety Care feature. With it, when the owner of the phone dials an emergency number a text message will automatically be sent with an alert message and the location of the phone.

Processor and Memory:

The LG Optimus L3 II runs smoothly out of the box and that is something we appreciate a lot given the low-specced processor under the hood.

Getting into the technical details, the device runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon S1 MSM7225A chip with a 1GHz single-core Cortex A5-based processor and Adreno 200 graphics. There is 512MB of RAM on board. That is far from what we see as powerful silicon but it is indeed a slight upgrade over the 800MHz processor on last year’s L3.

	Quadrant Standard	AnTuTu
LG Optimus L3 II	2063	5800
Sony Xperia E	2424
Samsung Galaxy Young	2119	4749

The handset ships with 4GB of internal storage, but only around 1.75GB of those are available for use by the end user. Luckily, storage is expandable via microSD cards of up to 32 gigs and cards are hot swappable.

Internet and Connectivity:

The handset comes with LG’s own browser pre-loaded and we are happy to say everything flowed smoothly as we navigated around our favorite web spots. Scrolling around and zooming in and out happened with almost no delay, and the browser offers to save pages for offline viewing as well as show desktop versions of websites. There is no Adobe Flash support but that is more of a situation with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean rather than anything else.


The phone supports 3G connectivity with speeds reaching 7.2Mbps on the downlink, and there is Wi-Fi connectivity, Bluetooth 2.1 and GPS as well, of course.

Camera:

The 3.2-megapixel fixed-focus camera with no flash is nothing to write home about. It’s a decidedly mediocre shooter that you should use only when no other option is available.

Images captured on it turn out smudgy, noisy and soft. Colors skew towards yellowish, unnatural tones and dynamic range is particularly awful in contrasty scenes where the sky often looks like one uniform burned white spot. Having a fixed focus camera (as opposed to an auto-focus one) also means that objects up close (closer than around a feet) will appear out of focus. That’s right - macro shots are not an option here.


Video capture maxes out at 640 x 480 pixel quality (VGA) and just like the images is way too smudgy for any serious use.

LG Optimus L3 II Sample Video:



The handset lacks a front-facing camera, and that’s a downside for those that want to use it with VoIP apps like Skype and Google Hangouts. A neat feature the camera has is voice activation so you can shout something funny like “whisky” or “kim-chi” to take a shot.

Multimedia:

The music player is very well polished. It divides your music collection into songs, artists, albums and genres, and it also has a by folder view.

Sound output from the loudspeaker on the L3 II is sufficiently loud, but very-very tinny with almost no depth to sound.

The video player is a brilliant effort on LG’s part. It comes with gesture support so swiping left or right would fast forward or revert the video, and swipes up and down control the volume in a way similar to MX Player. It grabs all of your videos and arranges them neatly, and you can even dig by folder to select the right video. The handset plays back files at its native resolution at ease and even handles Xvid-encoded files out of the box.



Call Quality:

Call quality on the handset is mediocre. On our end of the line, callers sounded as if they were talking through a blanket - voices were unnatural and muffled in the earpiece.

On the other end of the line, the microphone output of the phone was loud but lacked a bit in clarity. Being affordable, the device expectedly has no second mic for no noise cancellation and side noise could be an issue.

Battery Life:

The Optimus L3 II comes with a pretty impressive 1540mAh battery that provides for a quoted talk time of 16.5 hours on 2G and 11.5 hours on 3G.

In our experience the handset easily lasts around two days on a single charge and if you don’t watch many videos we can see it going into three day territory. That’s definitely quite an asset for a smartphone.

Conclusion:

With a price of around $140 off contract, the Optimus L3 II has fierce competition among low-end Androids, but not only. We honestly think the small screen in the L3 II takes a lot of the beauty of Android and that's one big reason against buying it. There are phones with slightly larger screens, but even a small increase in screen size makes a big difference for the user experience. The camera is also disappointing even for such an affordable device. Combine those two and you have solid reasoning for going against this otherwise fun chubby little Android.

Phones like the Sony Xperia E offer a larger, better screen at virtually the same price point. Cheap Windows Phone handsets have upped the stakes even higher and the Nokia Lumia 520 comes with a spacious 4-inch display with a higher resolution and much more functionality at a price range only slightly higher than the L3 II. But neither of them have such a huge battery that will easily last two full days, and that along with the cheap price would be the strongest features of this phone.

LG Optimus L3 II Video Review: