LG Optimus Me P350 Review

Introduction:

The teen-oriented LG Optimus Me P350 Android handset looks pretty cool, shaped like a bar of soap, and having five colored battery covers to choose from in pink, gray, black, blue and red. The specs are rather low-end, but the phone is not pretending to be anything but a budget Android 2.2 solution, and even throws in a 2GB memory card for good measure.

It can be viewed as the younger brother of the successful LG Optimus One, from where it borrows the 600Mhz chipset, but can it achieve the same popularity in the bargain Android niche? Read on to find out...

Design:

The first thing that comes to mind when you grab the smallish LG Optimus Me P350 is that the designers haven't put much effort to slim it or lighten it - it is actually pretty heavy for such a tiny handset. Not that 4.59oz (130g) are heavy, but for a phone of this size, carrying a 2.8” LCD display with 240x320 pixels of resolution, it is quite the heft, considering phones with 4”+ screens now weigh less than that. On the other hand the weight makes it feel solid when held.



You can compare the LG Optimus Me P350 with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

The screen itself is one of the most basic capacitive displays you can find these days, and, as such, doesn't shine in the brightness or readability departments, especially when staring at text while browsing or reading emails, due to the lowly 240x320 resolution. Underneath the display are four capacitive Android navigation buttons, which are not the most responsive we've tried. A welcome element is the ellipse-shaped elongated key below them, which serves as send/end and power/lock keys when pressed in both ends. Always good to have a physical button when you end or answer a call, makes the action feel complete.


The battery cover comes in a variety of youthful colors, as we mentioned, and the two ends are elevated, making for a “valley” in the middle, which firms the grip while talking. The back hosts the 3MP camera, which doesn't sport an adjacent LED flash.


At the curved top we find the standard audio jack, on the right is the easy to feel and press volume rocker, and the left is reserved for the microUSB port with a protective cap.


All in all, a pleasant, unassuming design in a phone that is easy to hold despite its small size, and feels solid thanks to its weight. Adding comfortable physical keys to answer or end a call, which provide a good tactile feedback, is certainly an advantage, too.

Interface and Functionality:

The LG Optimus Me P350 carries LG's Optimus UI on top of Android 2.2 Froyo, which has been tweaked a bit, with some refreshed icon here and there. Other than that it offers the standard fare – a number of homescreens, where you can place the usual Android and LG widgets, and a dock at the bottom of them, from where to choose the Messaging and Phone apps, or enter the main menu.

There is notable lag throughout the interface - when scrolling, when registering a touch, and when starting an application. We've seen much sprightlier performance with the same Qualcomm MSM7227 600MHz chipset, so maybe it has to do with the paltry 140MB of RAM inside the LG Optimus Me P350. Also, when two or more apps are being downloaded and installed at once, the handset slowed down to a stop on us a few times.



Browser, Connectivity and Software:

Browsing on the LG Optimus Me P350 is not for the faint of heart at this screen size and resolution, since the text is unreadable when zoomed out, and barely readable when zoomed in. The Froyo browser here doesn't support Adobe Flash, due to the weak chipset, and the Flash websites warn you of missing plugin. The display does support multitouch, though, for pinch-to-zoom. Double-tap to zoom works, too, but all actions in the browser, including scrolling, felt quite sluggish for us impatient reviewers.


As for connectivity, the LG Optimus Me P350 actually has the full set – 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS, plus an FM radio with RDS when the supplied headset is connected to serve as antenna. We managed to lock GPS signal sufficiently quick, but following your route on such a small screen should be left for only the direst of situations.


The phone comes with the ThinkFree Office document viewer and file manager, as all of LG's Android handsets lately, which is very helpful out of the box. All other apps are the standard Android fare, LG hasn't even tried to skin them differently, like it did with the music player in the LG Optimus 2X, but we are talking an entirely different class struggle here.



Camera and Multimedia:

The camera interface for the 3MP shooter on the back of the LG Optimus Me P350 is slightly rearranged from what we've seen so far on LG's Android handsets, in order to fit the smaller screen. The color effects access icon is on the initial screen, for instance. The interface also offers white balance, ISO and the said color effects, like Mono, Negative, Solarize, Sepia and Aqua. No other fancies, not even face-tracking or recognition.

The photos themselves are of below average quality, even for a basic 3MP phone camera. Granted, we shot on a cloudy day, but nevertheless the photos look dull, with large unfocused spots, and low on detail.



The LG Optimus Me P350 shoots a fairly fluid VGA video with 24fps, but that's all there is to it – the same blurry, lacking detail picture is present in the video, as in the stills.

LG Optimus Me P350 Sample Video:



Both the music player and the gallery are the standard Android applications with no skinning on top. The handset supports MPEG-4 video playback up to 480x800 resolution, but also played DivX/Xvid out of the box, up to VGA res.

Performance and Conclusion:

The call quality offered by the LG Optimus Me P350 is decent, with high volume in the earpiece on our end, since it doubles as a better than average loudspeaker too. The other party, however, said we sound a bit muffled, and the volume was low, so the microphone at the bottom is not the best there is.

The 1250mAh battery is rated for seven hours of talk time in 3G mode by the manufacturer, which is about average for an Android handset.

With the LG Optimus Me P350 the Korean company shows it will be focusing not only on innovative high-end phones this year, like the groundbreaking LG Optimus 2X or LG Optimus 3D, but will also pay attention to the low-end.

It's a budget-friendly phone with a youthful character thanks to the soap-bar shape and colorful back covers, which are sure to attract the attention of many, especially knowing how skilled at marketing LG is.

Still, we wish the screen had a tad higher resolution, not to mention the sluggish interface, and lack of  Adobe Flash support, but we can overlook those, considering the price range. Our main complaint, though, is that the camera should have been a lot better than what we have now - weak, even for a budget handset.

There are quite a lot of alternatives in the budget niche to the LG Optimus Me P350. The Samsung Galaxy 5, for example, is lighter, with identically-sized 2.8” display. and offers better camera, but runs Android 2.1, which is not a big deal, considering that the Optimus Me P350 doesn't support Adobe Flash anyway. If you are willing to go upstream a little, you can grab the LG Optimus One, which will grant you a bigger screen and better camera. The HTC Wildfire offers the same low resolution, on a larger 3.2” screen with a 5MP camera and HTC build quality.

Software version of the reviewed unit: LG-P350-V10b

LG Optimus Me P350 Video Review: