en you hold the Optimus One in your hand, the first thing you’ll notice is that it’s rather rubbery, with no obvious metallic accents, its also quite lightweight (129 g) making it not too uncomfortable to hold. Unlike the newer generation of HTC phones (Desire HD and Desire Z / T-Mobile G2), we liked the fact that the Optimus One boasts hard keys for its menu, home, back and search function rather than touchscreen keys.



Like majority of Androids, the microSD card is not accessible without opening the back cover. Google Android may seem less user friendly and more complicated to many users compared to iOS, but with Android 2.2 (Froyo) equipped on board the Optimus One P500, we felt it was pretty self explanatory and easy to use. As our handset had been sent to us from Three, there were plenty of goodies already packed within. Some quick shortcuts already on the home screen allowing you to quickly glance at your Three balance, top up and buy add ons. While of course there is a range of apps downloadable from the application Market, for new users to Android, Facebook, Twitter, Google Talk, YouTube, Google Maps with free turn by turn navigation already comes built in, saving you the hassle.

If you need to constantly catch up with your emails, the P500’s built in email support is excellent, it will easily cope with all your accounts, including Outlook using Microsoft Exchange. If you use Gmail, there’s fantastic support for it as well as other Google services across all Android devices such as Google Reader, afterall Android does belong to Google. LG have added a little something of their own as well, when you drag the notification menu down, they’ve built in a few connectivity controls within the menu to increase accessibility. Though this is already available as a separate widget in Froyo, we didn’t mind. On the other hand, we couldn’t quite take out the recently used applications feature which was meant to be a new functionality for Android’s recent update. Don’t have great expectations, the Optimus One’s 3.2-inch HVGA offers a resolution of just 320 x 480 pixels, while most flagships have 400×800 these days. This means its rather difficult to read text when viewing a whole web page, the size of the screen doesn’t help either.

Nonetheless, we do think LG has impressed us by giving the P500 a multitouch screen. Therefore, when you’re browsing or viewing photos, you can zoom in and out by either double tapping, or by pinching with your fingers just like an iPhone. It does become jerky at times but majority of the time during our testing it was pretty smooth. As a fan of physical QWERTY keyboards, I personally did not fancy the Optimus One’s on-screen keyboard at all. Most likely because of the narrow screen, the touchscreen just felt too cramped to type at a pace that I would have liked. You can of course improve this by turning the phone on its side and rotate into landscape mode. Overall, the touchscreen is responsive but its not the best we’ve seen, even for LG standards.

Running Applications

If you plan on buying an Android device mainly for web browsing, keeping up to date with news, Facebook, Twitter and your emails, and running productivity apps, the LG Optimus One will serve you right. If playing Raging Thunder 2 or Asphalt HD is your intention, we would recommend you try alternative devices. Playing low paced apps such as Air Control was without any problems however, any app more graphically demanding simply weren’t very enjoyable. The phone will ‘bare the burden and try’ to run but expect it to struggle from the start with plenty of lags.

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