LG Optimus 2X review, Price, pictures, Details, model specifications
Begun the dual-core revolution has. And there’s no scouting time – the offensive starts with the big guns. The LG Optimus 2X is not just counting on the fancy Tegra 2 name to generate the sales – it is a powerful smartphone through and through.
The fancy camera with Full HD video recording alone is enough to bring any handset into the limelight and the fact that it’s not even the Optimus 2X key feature speaks volume. As far as hardware evolution goes, the Optimus 2X promises to be one of the biggest steps forward in the mobile phone industry.
Key features:
- Quad-band GSM and dual-band 3G support
- 10.2 Mbps HSDPA and 5.76 Mbps HSUPA
- 4.0″ 16M-color capacitive IPS LCD touchscreen of WVGA resolution (480 x 800 pixels)
- Android OS v2.2 Froyo with LG Home launcher
- Dual-core 1GHz ARM Cortex-A9 proccessor, ULP GeForce GPU, Tegra 2 chipset
- 512 MB RAM
- 8 MP autofocus camera with LED flash and geotagging
- 1080p video recording @ 24fps, 720p@30fps
- 1.3 MP front-facing camera with videocalls
- Wi-Fi b/g/n and DLNA
- GPS with A-GPS, digital compass
- 8GB internal storage and microSDslot for up to 32GB cards
- Accelerometer, gyroscope, and proximity sensor
- microHDMI port with HDMI mirroring
- Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
- Stereo FM radio with RDS
- microUSB port (charging) and stereo Bluetooth v2.1
- Smart dialing, voice dialing
- DivX/XviD video support
- Innovative gesture controls
- Adobe Flash 10.1 support
- Dolby Mobile and SRS sound enhancement
Main disadvantages
- Despite similar technology LCD isn’t quite as impressive as the iPhone4 screen
- No dedicated camera key and no lens cover
- 1080p recording isn’t well polished
- No Android 2.3 Gingerbread at launch
- Audio quality is only average
- Below average speaker loudness
There are always a few compromises necessary with modern-day smartphones, but those are brought to a minimum with the Optimus 2X. You have a relatively good display (large, too), lots of oomph under the sleek hood and an excellent snapper at the back, plus all but the kitchen sink in the connectivity department.
Controls and construction
Moving on, we see the four keys below the LG Optimus2X display – all using the capacitive touch technology. There’s the usual Menu, Back and Home keys, plus a search button that is optional as far as Android handsets go.
As usual you also get extra functionality with long-press on some of the keys. Holding the menu forces the virtual keyboard out, a long press on the home key makes the task switcher pop-up appear, while press-and-hold on the search key triggers the voice search.
On top of the display sit the 1.3 MP front-facing camera for video-calling and video-chat, the earpiece and the proximity sensor. There’s also an ambient light sensor here, allowingautomatic brightness control.
Moving to the right side of the LG Optimus 2X brings us upon the two volume keys. Decently sized, those cause little usability issues.
What bothers us more though is the lack of camera key here. With a shooter this good it’s a real pity that LG didn’t find space for the button that really takes usability to a different level.
The left side of the Optimus 2X bears no control elements whatsoever.
On the bottom we find the microUSB data cable/charger plug and a couple of grills. There’s no cover over the opening, which is a plus to usability, but suggest dust accumulation over time.
Those of you who noticed the striking resemblance to the iPhone 4 bottom, earn an extra point here.
Interestingly, the ports at the bottom provide the same functionality– one of the grills hidesthe microphone, while the other hosts the loudspeaker.
The top of the Optimus 2X is where it gets interesting. You get the 3.5mm audio jack here, which is again unprotected, along with the power key and the microHDMI port. The Optimus 2X can easily stream 1080p footage to your Full HD TV or monitor and since it supports HDMI mirroring you can see the stream on both the external and the internal monitors.
The 8 MP camera lens is located at the back, right next to the (not quite capable) LED flash. On the plus side LED flash is a go for video lighting so you might be able to capture some good low-light 1080p footage if you don’t get too far away from your subject.
A potential problem with the camera is that not only does it lack any protection, but it is also protruding. Unless some really tough glass has been used on top, scratches are certain to appear quickly and worsen the image quality.
Also the glass on top is pretty easy to smudge, whileit’s particularly hard to clean.It’s probably a good idea to check it out every time you are about to shoot something.
The microSD card slot is under the battery cover, but fortunately it is hot-swappable. It handles all kinds of memory cards currently available so you can easily expand the Optimus 2X storage by up to 32 GB.
The other thing of notice under the back panel is the 1500 mAh Li-Ion battery. It’s said to last for up to 400 hours of stand-by or up to 7 hours and 50 minutes of talk time, but our unit hardly made it through more than 36 hours of heavy usage. That’s not bad considering that we fiddled with the different features of the phones for at least a couple of hours a day, but it isn’t great either.
We also did a dedicated battery test in video playback mode, by looping an SD sample over and over with the screen brightness set to 50%. The LG Optimus 2X lost 90% of its battery juice (at which point the video player is automatically switched off) in 5 hours and 20 minutes. Again that’s not too bad, but we’ve seen far better.
The general ergonomics of the Optimus 2X are quite good. If you are ok withhandlinga 4” smartphone, this one will suit you fine. And even if you find it to be a little over the top we advise you to as least try it out before rejecting it. Plus, handling a larger phone gets easier with time.
LG Home spices up Android 2.2 Froyo
LG has provided a custom launcher for their Android 2.2 running flagship. If you plan on changing it for one of the dozens third party launchers from the Android Market feel free to disregard the next few paragraphs and skip to the benchmark part of this chapter.
Still we would strongly advise you to give it a try first as the LG Home is not too bad at all. It brings several key updates compared to previous versions of the launcher. For starters you can check it out in action in the following video.
There’s now a view mode similar to the HTC Sense leap view, where you see all your homescreen panes in one place and pressing one of them zooms in on it.
This view mode is triggered by the familiar pinch zoom gesture.
The available number of homescreen panes can be customized too with the available options being 3, 5 and 7. A clear homescreen shortcut lets you remove all content from some of your panes with a couple of clicks.
There are four shortcuts docked at the bottom of the LG Optimus 2X screen and are visible on both the homescreen and in the app drawer. You get phone, contacts, messaging and a home/applications button.
The LG customizations continue with the main menu. You get not one but three different options for its styling – a side scrollable horizontal grid, a vertical grid that you scroll upwards and downwards and List view. In vertical grid mode you get icons grouped by categories, which you are free to change however you please.
The notification area, one of the Android strong points, has a few tweaks as well – it’s five switches are now operating Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, sound and automatic rotation. There are also music player controls docked here.
The final noteworthy features of the LG Optimus 2X stock user interface are the gesture controls. We’ve seen turn-to-mute, turn-to-snooze plenty of times. But how about tapping on the side of your phone to flick through images or tilting it to pan around zoomed images. You can also move the text cursor character by character just by tapping on the side. It’s pretty cool if you think about, but should you find it unnecessary or bothering you are also able to switch it off.
We did a short video demo to give a better idea of what those gestures are all about.
Nvidia Tegra 2 performance
And now for the really interesting part – the Nvidia Tegra 2 platform performance. The Optimus 2X is the first handset with a dual-core CPU-packing chipset and everyone is pretty excited to find out what good that is.
If you checked out our preview you already know the answer to that. Despite the fact that Android 2.2 is by far not the best optimized system as far as two CPU cores management is concerned the thing is a real beast.
As you can see the LG Optimus 2X benchmark results are way better than anything else we have seen before. The Hummingbird-rocking Galaxy S simply stands no chance against the Tegra 2.
And as we found, out the Javascript performance of the LG Optimus 2X even comes close to a year-old netbook-grade CPU. That’s impressive stuff for a smartphone no matter how you look at it.
Have in mind though that these are just numbers representing the Tegra 2 pure calculating powers. You shouldn’t expect to feel a miraculous change in real-life experience though. Most current Android flagship are already buttery smooth and there’s little room for improvement there. And all the resource-heavy games run fine on single core CPUs too.
However once the next crop of top-quality games hits things will certainly change. Once developers start to make use of the Tegra 2 advanced GPU you’ll be able to use its full potential.
Nvidia already announced that we’ll see Android games using the Unreal 3 engine (Dungeon Defenders) and perhaps even the iDTech 5 engine (Doom 4 and Rage) and the Frostbite engine (Battlefield: Bad Company).
So to summarize the LG Optimus 2X current performance is spotless, but that doesn’t make it much better than its competitors. However as software continues to advance, it is certain to pull off of the chasing pack
A social phonebook with an agenda
The phonebook displays all the contacts in a list ordered alphabetically and there is an alphabet scroll on the right. There’s also a regular search bar.
The list can be sorted by first or last name and you can choose how contacts are displayed – First Name, Last Name or the opposite.
Filters keep the phone book from getting overcrowded – you can choose which groups are displayed and which are hidden (e.g. Family, email contacts, Twitter contacts and so on).
Each contact is displayed with a contact photo and name – a tap on the photo brings up the quick contacts keys. You can use those to call the contact, send them a message or email or view their profile.
Viewing a single contact uses a tabbed interface. The first tab is Info – and it shows all available info for the contact with handy one-tap shortcuts for calling, messaging and so on. The next tab is History, which shows the communication history with the contact (calls, SNS updates, everything).
The next two tabs are Photos (which show the contacts online albums) and Agenda, which lists all activities in the Calendar that include the contact (according to the Guests field in the event details).
You can link contacts (“join” in the Optimus 2X terminology) so that if you have a contact added to multiple services, all the data from them is pooled in one place. When you tap Join, the phonebook will suggest a contact based on name and it’s right most of the time.
You can manually pick another one if it’s wrong of course. When you add a new account, the phone will offer to import all, only some of the contacts or only those it already has in the phonebook.
Editing a contact is mostly unchanged. You have all the types listed (numbers, email addresses, etc) and there’s a plus sign on the right – clicking it adds another item of that type. Pressing the minus sign under it deletes unneeded info.
Telephony is good
LG Optimus One 2X showed good signal reception even in areas of poor coverage. The in-call quality though is good but rather quiet even at the loudest setting.
The Dialer shows a virtual phone keypad that lets you dial a number. Smart Dial is available and works like a charm – it searches both numbers and names. Only one matching contact is displayed, but if you tap the down arrow button, the rest show up as well.
We ran our traditional loudspeaker test and the LG Optimus 2X. It performed pretty poorly, scoring a Below Average. The loudspeaker is generally very quiet and you’ll miss phone calls in loud environments.
You can find more about the testing procedure here.
Rich messaging capabilities
The LG Optimus 2X can handle all common types of messages with ease – SMS, MMS and email. Email support is excellent with support for Exchange out of the box and social media buffs will be pleased with the level of integration of that content as well.
A press-and-hold on the text box gives you access to functions such as cut, copy and paste. You are free to paste the copied text across applications like email, notes, chats, etc.
Image gallery with 3D effects
The LG Optimus 2X uses the standard Android gallery. The gallery automatically locates the images and videos no matter where they are stored. The gallery boasts cool 3D effects and transitions, which we find rather attractive.
Images and videos placed in different folders appear in different sub-galleries that automatically get the name of the folder, which is very convenient – just like a file manager.
The different albums appear as piles of photos, which fall in neat grids once selected.
Eye-candy music player
The music looks familiar but it has seen some polish. It can do the usual filtering by album and artist and you have alphabet search and regular search for finding songs quicker.
FM Radio with RDS
If you get tired of your music collection, there’s an FM radio with RDS in the LG Optimus 2X. It can play over the headphones or the loudspeaker, but the headphones need to be plugged-in either way.
Average audio quality
The LG Optimus 2X did greatly in the first part of our audio quality test. When connected to an external amplifier the handset impresses with a really accurate audio output. All the readings in this case are great and if it wasn’t for the loudness, which is only average, we would say that it’s among the best on the market.
When headphones come into play however the stereo crosstalk takes a way too serious hit – it gets relegated from excellent to one of the worst we have seen. At least the rest of the readings as well as the volume levels are almost unaffected, which is somewhat of a consolation. Still we wouldn’t rate the Optimus 2X anything higher than average on this occasion.
You should bear in mind, we have a pre-release hardware on our hands, so things might be improved with retail units. We’ve certainly seen that happen before.
Portable movie player
The video player has a fairly simple interface – it’s just a list of all the videos on the devices. There’s an alphabet scroll to help users locate videos faster but that’s about it. You can of course play videos from the Gallery if you prefer its folder-centric organization.
The interface during playback is nothing overcomplicated either – there’s the scrubber to skip to some part of the video along with the play/pause button and next and previous buttons.
Two more buttons are available on the screen – one toggles cropping (i.e. fit video to screen, or crop it to fill the entire screen) and the other activates the Virtual surround.
The LG Optimus 2X handled just about every video file we threw at it – the usual 3GP and MP4 stuff along with WMV and AVIs using DivX and XviD. 1080p videos played well too – DivX and XviD videos that is, the MP4 FullHD videos we tried wouldn’t play (but 720p videos worked).
The video player wouldn’t play MKV files – a very common format for HD content, which is a dent in the Optimus 2X shining armor of FullHD support and HDMI connectivity.
Subtitles worked too and you have settings for font and size. You can toggle subtitles on and off, but there’s no option to manually load subtitles (so their file and the movie file have to have the same name).
There are some issues that need to be addressed though – only English subtitles worked, any non-Latin characters would cause the subtitles to fail (even Spanish subtitles). Using UTF didn’t help. The video player actually crashed a couple of times as we were trying out different subtitles.
To change the HDMI output resolution settings, you’ll have to access the main Android settings.
The 8 megapixel camera does a solid job
LG Optimus 2X comes with an 8 megapixel shooter, which sounds pretty decent on paper. After a continuous run of bad cameras from LG though, we had to try it ourselves, before we recommend it to anyone.
As it turns out we had nothing to worry about and the Optimus 2X snapper did a pretty good job.
We found the user interface to be quite convenient, though many of the important settings are inside the extended settings menu, so they take a while to toggle.
Also the whole camera experience would have been much more convenient if there was a camera button onboard, but that has obviously been sacrificed in favor of a slimmer profile.
The camera features are pretty good with face and smile detection, touch focus and geo-tagging on board along with ISO setting and preset scenes and effects. There’s panorama shot and “out-focusing shot”, which blurs anything away from the point of focus.
There’s beauty and art shot too, which do automatic postprocessing to the photo. Digital image stabilization is also available.
The biggest improvement we noticed is in terms of image quality. Now don’t get us wrong – the Optimus 2X is no Nokia N8, but it delivers solid 8 MP photos with plenty of detail and pleasing color rendition (though it tends to miss-adjust the white balance). The contrast could be a bit better and the noise levels are higher than average, but the overall result is pretty good.
Plus, the handset is not yet available so, who knows, those might improve before it hits the shelves. One area we hope they optimize is the shot-to-shot time – at the moment it’s several seconds and can be quite annoying at times.
Photo quality comparison
The LG Optimus 2X enter the competition over at our in our Photo Compare Tool. The tool’s page will give you enough info on how to use it and what to look for.
1080p video is where the fun starts
1080p video recording is probably the second most important thing about the Optimus 2X specs sheet – just after Tegra 2. The increased processing power of the NVIDIA platform has allowed the Android smartphone to become the first one capable of creating Full HD footage.
Video quality comparison
The LG Optimus 2X is the first phone in our Video Compare Tool database that can record 1080p and it will serve as yardstick for upcoming FullHD shooters. Check it out – the Tool’s page includes a quick walkthrough on how to use it and what to look for.
Good connectivity with HDMI
The connectivity that the LG Optimus 2X has to offer is good and though it lacks buzzwords like Bluetooth 3.0 and 4G, you won’t miss much (BT3.0 doesn’t do much and “4G” is often misused while meaning HSPA+).
It has quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE for world-wide connectivity and dual-band 3G with 10.2Mbps/5.76Mbps for faster mobile Internet in areas with supported 3G bands.
The Optimus 2X has Wi-Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP and a microUSB port to offer for local data transfers. For multimedia connectivity, there’s DLNA (which can play media from/to supported devices wirelessly) and a miniHDMI port for outputting HD video.
USB tethering and Wi-Fi hotspot options are available for sharing the phones data connection. You can secure the Wi-Fi hotspot using WPA2 or leave it open.
Using the SmartShare app you can control a DLNA network – you can play media from other devices (e.g. NAS) on your phone or play something from the phone on another device (e.g. DLNA-enabled TV).
The web browser is good, has Flash
The Android browser is one of the best available on a mobile device – put it on a powerful hardware like the LG Optimus 2X has and it provides flawless experience.
The user interface is completely minimalistic (it’s the Google way). All you get on the screen is an address bar and +/- zoom buttons. The address bar is placed on top of the page, so scrolling down moves it out of view and the zoom controls auto-hide.
Brilliant office document editor, good organizer
The LG Optimus 2X comes with the usual set of organizing apps and there’s a preloaded document viewer and editor (well sort of).
The app in question is Document Master and it’s one of the most feature advanced mobile editors we’ve seen. You can of course view documents – Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents and PDF files too.
Extensive Facebook and Twitter integration
The LG Optimus 2X features great SNS integration. Both Facebook and Twitter contacts can be added to the phonebook and you can link those to existing phone contacts – in fact, the first time you create an account, the phone will offer to import the contacts from that social network.
It’s clever too – you can import all contacts, manually select which ones to import, or just those who match people in your phonebook.
Android Market gives you loads of apps
The LG Optimus 2X is running the latest available version of Android and has a WVGA screen, giving you access to the whole Android Market (some apps won’t run on older versions or low-res screens).
The structure of the Android Market is quite simple – featured apps on top and above them, three sections (Applications, Games and Downloads). There is also a shortcut up there for initiating a search.
The Applications and Games sections are divided into subsections (e.g. Communication, Entertainment etc.) so you can filter the apps that are relevant to you. Of course, there is also an option of displaying them all in bulk, but you’ll probably need days to browse them all that way.
Google maps and GPS navigation
The LG Optimus 2X comes with a built-in GPS receiver. It got an accurate GPS lock very quickly. If you need only general location (within 100-150 meters) for location-based services, you can use Cell-ID and Wi-Fi network positioning.
The Google Maps 5.0 is part of the standard Android package. It uses vector maps, which are smaller and download faster but also support cool 3D views. You can use the two finger camera tilt and camera rotate gestures to look around (though 3D building are not available everywhere).
