I have owned this phone for over 2 months and now is probably a good time to write a review.
Design
The phone feels strong and decently built(Not creaky, but do not expect a blackberry like build). The plastic material used on the body is non-slippery and feels confident to hold. The screen is large enough and has medium resolution. It is comfortable to read web-pages indoors or out of direct sunlight. Under direct sunlight the screen is difficult to read.
The phone is not very slim and is wide so it can be difficult for people with a small palm. Fat fingers are very bad for typing on capacitive touch screens. The default on screen keyboard can be a nightmare for folks with fat fingers. Volume buttons are embedded in the chrome on the side of the phone and there is a depression provided to mark the up down buttons making it easy to find and operate. The power button however may require some hunting.
Essentials
Call quality is good. I can always hear the other side well and have not received complaints with my sound. I found the speaker phone also to be fairly loud. WIFI reception is strong and it connects to my secure WIFI network automatically when within range.
The supplied charger plugs into the standard micro-USB slot and thankfully the phone can also be charged while connected to the PC using USB. The phone can also be charged with other chargers(E.g. Nokia E52 charger).
The headphones plug into the 3.5 mm slot on the top of the phone. Unfortunately LG packs a cheap headphone with this phone. I tried using my Nokia headset; however this does not work for calls but works for music.
The battery gave me about 36 hours with extensive browsing and with approximately about 10x3=30mins calls. In comparison, my Nokia E52 could give me 72 hours with the same usage.
Bluetooth and Radio and Music
I have also not tried Bluetooth and Radio, so have no comments regarding Bluetooth signal strength and Radio Reception. I have also played mp3 without any issues.
I watch a lot of YouTube videos on the phone when connected to my home WIFI. The videos play well IMO and I did not see any jerks or incompatibilities.
GPS
The GPS strength seems to be good. It could pick up GPS signals even where the Nokia 5800 was hunting. The bundled NDRIVE software is quite user UNfriendly. NDRIVE allows users to download maps for one country free of charge. I used NDRIVE to navigate from Coimbatore to some smaller towns and it worked well. I think the map quality is comparable to OVI map though the NDRIVE software is not that good.
Camera
The inbuilt camera is a measly 3.0 MP. It has auto focus and as with all cheap cameras it can shoot decent pictures with sufficient light. Picture quality in low light situations is bad. All expected features like zoom, Shooting modes, ISO settings are available. There is no dedicated camera button so focus is achieved by keeping the on-screen button pressed.
Bundled Software and Operating System
My phone came with firmware version V10B. LG bundles the phone with some applications like AG Indian Newspapers, Bollywoodji, Infant Vaccination, LG App Browser, Aldiko, N Drive, ThinkFree Office. Shockingly there is no option to remove these bundled applications. I have used ThinkFree Office with different documents authored with Office 2003 and Office 2007 and did not find any problems opening these documents for reading. I also tried opening some PowerPoint presentations and these worked well too.
LG Provides its LG PC Suite application on the SD Card. I found this application useful to sync contacts without syncing to Google servers first. It can also upgrade firmware when available.
It runs a version of the Android operating system called "Froyo". The operating system itself is quite stable. I have not had to switch off/remove battery etc in the past 2 months because of OS issues. The OS is from Google and it shows. All Google applications(Gtalk, Youtube, Gmail, GMaps, Google Search) work on this phone. It also shows some Advertisements occasionally(There are however, applications available to block these advertisements). The initial setup prompts you to enter your Google account information and uses it to configure various google utilities. For e.g. Picasa, Calender, Latitude etc.
There is no option to set profiles as in Nokia. There is just a toggle to silent mode operation. Again there are applications available that allow you to set profiles.
I was used to syncing my outlook calendar, Notes and Contacts with the phone. Unfortunately Android lacks such an application. Google provides an app called Google calendar sync which syncs your outlook calendar to Google Calender and the phone syncs with the Google calendar. Many organizations have policies against this so please check if you depend on this feature.
There is also no application to transfer Notes. Those uncomfortable syncing personal data to Google servers do not have many options.
LG has customised the OS, to add a notification screen which can be pulled down from the home screen. It allows to enable/disable GPRS, GPS, WIFI, Bluetooth. It also allows to toggle to silent mode. I personally found this notification screen to be a very useful feature.
This is my first capacitive touchscreen phone so cannot really compare the touchscreen performance. I would just like to however say that IMO the screen is pretty responsive, I have felt the phone lag slightly(very slightly), only when switching on/off the speaker phone in the middle of a call. I have not tried any CPU intensive tasks like Games etc. so please weigh my experience appropriately. Multitouch works well with applications like Gallery and Maps.
Other
For what it is worth, in India, the phone comes with insurance from LG in the box. Insurance is valid for 1 year from date of purchase and covers theft. Insurance does not cover water damage. The phone also ships with one months worth of free broadband usage. I have not yet tried this out.
I tried out the bundled leather pouch but did not find it very comfortable, so I ditched it and bought a local fabric pouch for Rs. 100. The default screen guard that comes with the phone also came off after a month of use, so I had to buy a screen guard costing Rs. 100. I payed Rs. 12500 for the phone. The shopkeeper would have agreed for 12300 if I had payed by cash.
Postscript
The phone prompted me to upgrade to version V10C which is the latest firmware for India. I upgraded and noticed very sluggish performance. Further after the upgrade, I could not ROOT my phone. I use some software which need ROOTING capability, so I followed instructions on various online forums and downgraded back to V10B. Folks who are planning to buy a new phone, please be aware because your phone might ship with the new firmware. Downgrading to V10B is fairly straight forward and easy though.
Note: My comments about firmware V10C are after using the phone for a few hours only. Please leave comments if you observe other pros or cons.
Conclusion
I would recommend this phone highly because it sports good hardware(600MHZ processor, 512 MB RAM and 512MB Internal Memory) for the price point in comparison to other phones. The pre-installed bloat-ware can be easily removed after ROOTING the phone(Reason I do not want to upgrade to firmware V10C). Similarly for folks with fat fingers, they can install the Swype Keyboard(In beta as of date) free of cost.
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anilkumarr11 2/7/2011 8:38:16 PM LG Optimus One P500
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