LG Optimus 2X Full Walkthrough and Hands On

The LG Optimus 2X has been on the scene for quite a few months now but does it still compete with the other top end devices on the market? We take a hands on look to see if the 2X is still a good smartphone choice.

Hands on the new LG Optimus 2X is not a light device and weighs in at a hefty(ish) 139g. In the day of phones that just break the 100g boundary you can really feel the weight. It does feel nice however and fits nicely in the hand.

It’s appealing to look at also, a black candy bar shaped device that is minimalist through and through. It has no physical buttons on its face, opting for touch buttons, and it is completely black when the phone is off –making it attractively monolithic.

The screen is also a decent 4in size, quite large and when we switched it on we were more than impressed with the colours. The screen portrays a wonderful depth of shade and whites and blacks are wonderfully deep. It’s also super bright – nearly as bright as the much acclaimed Samsung Super AMOLED screens..

The screen was responsive and the phone very fast. This is obviously down to its huge processing power. The LG Optimus 2X has a dual core 1GHz chip made by NVIDIA called the Tegra 2. To be honest there was nothing in the Android Market we could throw at it to slow it down.

One of the downsides we found, though many people won’t notice unless they are phone geeks was that it has a dated version of Android – Froyo2.2. This does mean the phone doesn’t come with all the very latest Google Wizardry, but an update is supposedly in the pipeline.

The camera was also nice, but we did feel nothing special. It’s an 8mp offering that can also shoot 1080p footage. This can be sent to a larger screen using wireless DNLA or using the HDMI port available.

The HDMI port is a welcome touch and the LG is well connected in general, also including a Micro SD port to upgrade its memory to 32GB, a 3.5mm port for headphones and a mini USB slot for all you other needs.

We found the apps that were preloaded were good, the music player was especially nice and the others such as the reader and social networking functions were also nice. The LG Optimus 2X was definitely a fun phone to play with though we were a little disappointed that the power wasn’t used to some more spectacular end.

Still, with software updates on the horizon – notably the promised Android 2.3 Gingerbread update – we will just have to wait and see what improvements LG can bring to this side of things.